The Nation reported this week:
James O’Keefe, the founder and until this past February CEO of the right-wing nonprofit Project Veritas, is currently under investigation by the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office.
While the exact nature of the investigation is not yet public, the timing would suggest that it relates to O’Keefe’s alleged financial improprieties during his tenure as the group’s chairman and CEO. Back in February, O’Keefe was accused of spending “an excessive amount of donor funds in the last three years on personal luxuries” by the conservative nonprofit’s own board of directors, amid their very public feud over the management and future of Veritas. Westchester DA Miriam Rocah’s probe follows a raft of civil lawsuits, criminal investigations, and six-figure court losses that have trailed the group under O’Keefe’s leadership—including a still-active federal investigation into the theft of property belonging to President Biden’s daughter Ashley Biden.
“We don’t talk about how we start our investigations,” the Westchester County DA’s director of public affairs, Jin Whang, said when reached by phone. “But if you want confirmation that we were and are, then yes. We can confirm that.”
Attorneys for Project Veritas also filed a civil complaint against O’Keefe in federal court this past May, accusing the ostensible investigative reporting outfit’s original hidden-camera sting artist of breaching his contract and fiduciary duties to the group, among other counts. Despite that pending litigation, made public alongside a detailed new timeline reiterating the board’s own version of its disputes and grievances with O’Keefe, Veritas says that the organization did not prompt the Westchester DA’s investigation into its former leader via a formal criminal referral.
“Project Veritas did not initiate any potential investigation the Westchester DA’s office may be conducting with respect to James O’Keefe,” Hannah Giles, the newly appointed CEO of Project Veritas, responded via e-mail. “However, PV cooperates with the authorities as required by law.”
Giles’s assumption of leadership at Veritas reflects an attempt at continuity for the group, which was launched over a decade ago following the tactical successes of the infamous hidden camera stings against the liberal community-organizing group ACORN by her and O’Keefe. By April 2010, O’Keefe and Giles’s early one-off collaboration would result in the complete dissolution of ACORN’s network of local advocacy groups, whose “get out the vote” efforts had helped to enfranchise millions of low-income and minority voters in underserved communities.
The undercover videos, in which O’Keefe and Giles claimed to be a pimp and a prostitute seeking illicit financial advice from ACORN, ultimately crumbled under scrutiny from California’s attorney general and led to a six-figure settlement paid out to a former ACORN employee. But the viral heat generated by their stings within conservative media nevertheless skyrocketed both of them to a kind of partisan stardom, creating the conditions that allowed O’Keefe to incorporate Project Veritas as a tax-deductible 501(c)3 charity.
In the years since, O’Keefe has made a name for himself by attempting to unearth further supposed malfeasance by liberal activists, politicians, and institutions—as well as by his perceived foes in the establishment media and Big Tech. Multiple people caught up in O’Keefe’s investigations have lost their livelihoods in the frequently incoherent and often inaccurate publicity maelstroms that have followed the typical Project Veritas exposé: nonprofit workers, Obamacare navigators, NPR executives, public school teachers, and news media employees among them.
In October 2021, a federal judge finally stated the obvious about O’Keefe’s latter day Nixonian dirty tricksters, declaring that it was acceptable for litigants to refer to Project Veritas in open court as a “political spying operation.”
Though O’Keefe himself once betrayed his ambitions to make Veritas “the next great intelligence agency,” Veritas’s supposed charitable mission, as detailed annually in its nonprofit filings to the IRS, has consistently been to “investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions.” Better late than never: The group has finally uncovered all the above at the top of its own organization.
Following O’Keefe’s attempt to unilaterally fire Veritas Chief Financial Officer Tom O’Hara, in contravention of the 501(c)3’s bylaws, and O’Keefe’s own surprise resignation this past February, the Veritas board published a preliminary tally of its former leader’s financial misdeeds.
Pending a “third party investigative audit,” the board accused O’Keefe of spending “$14,000 on a charter flight to meet someone to fix his boat under the guise of meeting with a donor,” blowing over $150,000 on high-end limo services, and taking thousands of dollars more for personal DJ equipment. O’Keefe, they said, also requisitioned $60,000 for “dance events,” including the production of a semi-autobiographical pop music celebration of his life in muckraking: the Project Veritas Experience. Such self-indulgent expenditures would be what’s known within the Internal Revenue Code for tax-exempt 501(c)3s as “inurement.”
It’s worth noting that, by the end of the Trump years, Veritas’s cash flow offered ample opportunity for this kind of personal dipping: The group brought in over $22 million in 2020, an exponential swelling in revenue compared to the $396,450 in donations reported in its first year as a nonprofit. And O’Keefe was very much along for the ride, with his reported salary, $56,000 in 2012, growing ultimately to $430,920 by the time of his September 2022 at-will employment agreement.
In private, however, past and present Veritas executives have groused to us for much longer about O’Keefe’s dubiously charitable expenditures outside that reported compensation, including the construction of a recording studio for his high school music buddy Anthony Dini and tens of thousands of dollars in “investigating reporting” and “consulting” fees paid to O’Keefe’s pass-thru NJ S-corp, Veritas Inc.
There’s more, a lot more. James O’Keefe is Roger Stone without the survival instinct. It looks like he might be in very serious trouble and could even see the inside of a jail cell. Even better, Project Veritas itself might be over and done with … finally:
A mass ouster of employees from right-wing media group Project Veritas this week has left the company’s future in question, with a threadbare staff and serious fundraising concerns, say newly laid-off employees…
But employees who remained at Project Veritas said the company’s post-O’Keefe era wasn’t so great either. Staffers who were terminated this week complained that Project Veritas’ new CEO, Hannah Giles, struggled to fundraise and to articulate a clear mission for the company.
“The story of the James O’Keefe debacle was coherent,” one long-time Project Veritas employee, who was laid off Thursday, told The Daily Beast. “It was ‘power corrupts.’ It was a CEO who was drunk on power and loses control.”
But during Giles’ short tenure as CEO, “I don’t know what the fuck happened here,” the former staffer said.
Hannah Giles is as awful as O’Keefe so it’s no surprise that she wasn’t capable of handling the organization. They are all terrible people. Those who were laid off should take a good hard look at themselves and try to find redemption.