Apparently, ousting their founder wasn’t enough. Now they’re suing him for their own incompetence and financial bungling.
Seven months after James O’Keefe announced he’d been ousted from Project Veritas, the company he founded in 2010 has imploded. Former Veritas employee and investigative reporter Bobby Harr announced that Project Veritas has suspended all operations effective immediately, which The Post Millennial later confirmed.
“BREAKING: Project Veritas suspends all operations effective immediately,” Harr wrote on Wednesday. “CEO @HannahMGiles and Jen Kiyak of Human Resources cite financial ruin as reason for additional layoffs on 9/20/23 leaving merely a handful of employees left. All investigations halted as of today.”
A source close to the matter told The Post Millennial that the journalists who were left on staff after the August 17 mass firing were terminated on Wednesday. The journalists who had remained were essentially relegated to fundraising, as the company was floundering.
“SOS Hannah Giles just fired us all,” read a swiftly deleted tweet on August 17. Giles, who became notorious for starring in the ACORN video with founder and former CEO James O’Keefe that launched the company, took over for O’Keefe after he was summarily pushed out by the board of directors. She took over as CEO only to destroy the company entirely.
“Since James quit,” a source told Post Millennial, “the donations dried up…the donations never resumed. The board were desperate to bring Hannah on board because they thought it would be cute but the problem is she’s a charlatan and a fraud. Everything she’s ever done has been a failure and she lied to everyone claiming she had all these donors she could bring in.”
In February, O’Keefe stated that he had been suspended from his position as CEO. This came after 16 staffers sent a letter to the Project Veritas board of directors accusing O’Keefe of financial misdeeds and employee harassment.
“James has become a power-drunk tyrant and he is exactly who he pontificates on who we should be exposing,” the letter read.
“James O’Keefe IS Project Veritas” began to trend on Twitter. Many supporters and donors all balked at the idea that Veritas could continue without O’Keefe at the helm and prominent conservatives gave their support for O’Keefe.
Veritas said that they were confident in their ability to stay the course and continue to deliver on the mission O’Keefe set out for them, whether he was in charge the project or not. That turned out to not be accurate.
“Power drunk”…in other words, he valued substance over money and he said that in no uncertain terms:
I’m going to take you through what happened. Some of you don’t know these things. We’re talking about the story we broke. An unusual emergency happened on Thursday, February the 2nd – that’s a few days after the Pfizer story – I was informed by an officer of Project Veritas on the phone while enroute to the airport that he would resign unless I stepped down as CEO.
We’ve been having a conflict visions, him and I over fundraising… there were tactical disagreements about the boldness of approaches soliciting donations. I was told, and I’m paraphrasing, by asking for X dollars right now you will prevent 10x dollars down the road. That advice ran contrary to everything I knew to be true in my 13 years of fundraising. But that conflict was even more fundamental and essentially boiled down to this and my vision. I’m going to paraphrase Howard Roark, the architect, quote, ‘I don’t build in order to have donors. I have donors in order to build.’ That’s what I believed and I felt like we had a conflict of visions.
We measure our success in terms of what we produce, not just in terms of our wallets. That was a pretty fundamental conflict I felt. The day prior, I informed him in front of his colleagues that if he wasn’t willing to follow my lead he’d be shown the door. I tried to deal with it privately but I was unsuccessful and the disagreement boiled over publicly in a staff meeting. The next day, this individual refused to resign so I fired him.
Later that same day, that’s Thursday, February 2nd, a few days after the 50 million viewed Pfizer videos. I was informed by a different officer of Project Veritas that he would go to the board in a few hours from that moment and have an emergency vote to restructure this company, receiving an agenda in my email while I was sitting on an airplane tarmac with the doors closing, the meeting was scheduled for the moment that my plane landed in Nashville…
It became clear to me in that moment I would be removed from my position at Project Veritas by the time I landed at my destination. So, our mission continues on. I’m not done. The mission will perhaps take on a new name. And it may be no longer called Veritas. Project Veritas. There will be a bunch of people around me and I’ll make sure you know how to find me.
After he was forced to vacate his position at Project Veritas, he simply did what he does best; regroup and establish a successful enterprise of his own.
The morons succeeded in driving him out. He IS Project Veritas. Without him, they were finished. They lost impact and credibility.
Sucks to be them.
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