Inside the Rise and Fall of Project Veritas
Twitter lead client partner Alex Martinez had already gone on a handful of dates with Bobby Harr when, over drinks at a cute French restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Martinez found himself venting about Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform. Musk’s attitude toward disinformation concerned him. “People don’t know how to make a rational decision if you don’t put out correct things that are supposed to be out in the public,” he told Harr. And Martinez found Musk himself off-putting. “You’re literally special needs,” Martinez said to an imaginary Musk.
The next week, Martinez was eating alone at a different restaurant when Project Veritas founder and CEO James O’Keefe slid into his booth and began to read those exact words back to him. It turned out Harr had been a Project Veritas “undercover journalist” who’d secretly recorded all of their conversations and planned to publish parts of them. “Is it appropriate to mock special-needs people?” O’Keefe asked a stunned Martinez.
When Martinez tried to leave, O’Keefe and a crew with cameras set off after him in hot pursuit, shouting questions, rolling tape on this theater of cruelty. Martinez tried to escape into an apartment building, found it locked, and continued to flee. Eventually, he ducked into a nearby comedy club, cameras trailing every step.
As luck would have it, the club was owned by a Project Veritas fan more than willing to join in on the fun. The owner offered to let O’Keefe onstage to confront Martinez in front of a live audience, but the terrified Martinez managed to slip away into the night. O’Keefe arranged to return for a full set.
A couple of weeks later, the footage of Martinez’s nightmare of a night rolled behind O’Keefe. “Look at his face! Look at his face!” he said. “Imagine how bad it must be when you’re being chased by Project Veritas and you also forgot your keys!”
The audience was full of Project Veritas employees, ticket-holding fans, and invited guests. Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice magazine and founder of the Proud Boys, was one of them. Weirdly enough, so was I. After writing a piece about O’Keefe for this magazine a few months earlier, I’d landed on his regular invite list.
Everyone applauded wildly as O’Keefe finished and bowed. Chants of “James! James! James!” filled the room.
One year later, O’Keefe would no longer be with the company he founded and many of those cheering employees would despise him. The Project Veritas founder either left or was pushed out of his own company last year, depending on whom you ask — a fittingly explosive end to a roller coaster of a run.
Over O’Keefe’s 13 years, Project Veritas helped transform American conservatism from a political movement into a war machine. It attacked the Fake News Media before Trump gave it a name, filmed the swamp before he promised to drain it. The group worked tirelessly to reveal the secret sin it believes lies at the heart of liberal institutions and prove that its political opponents are hypocrites willing to lie, cheat, and steal to destroy democracy. We are all living in the world of information warfare and idol worship that Project Veritas helped create — before it imploded.
This article is part of that war, of course. I interviewed more than a dozen Veritas alums, most of whom are skilled at using the media as a sword. All hope this story will cut in their favor. “He wants you to be a propaganda vessel for him,” one former employee warns me. “He’s going to say things to you that he thinks are going to make it easier for you to say what he wants.” He was talking about O’Keefe, but he could be talking about anyone in Veritas’ orbit.
How It All Began
O’KEEFE WAS BORN in 1984 to middle-class parents in Bergen County, New Jersey. His high school yearbook shows him as a sharp-chinned teenager, leaning back with unselfconscious swagger in Matrix-style sunglasses beneath the label “best dancer.” His senior quote proved prescient in many ways: “ ‘I’d rather die of insanity pursuing the truth than live contentedly believing a lie’ —Nietzsche.” It’s a noble sentiment, but Friedrich Nietzsche never said it.
O’Keefe attended Rutgers, where he recorded his first-ever sting video: a deadpan complaint to a college official about the Lucky Charms leprechaun mascot, which he described as an offensive Irish stereotype. After graduation in 2006, he worked with Lila Rose, a young, camera-ready anti-abortion activist on a sting operation against Planned Parenthood. Left to his own devices afterward, he created sporadic prank videos with his buddies that felt more like Borat than breaking news.
That might have been the end of the O’Keefe story, if Hannah Giles, a 20-year-old woman he’d connected with online after the Planned Parenthood stings, hadn’t messaged him with a caper of her own: a plot that would eventually destroy the largest advocacy group for low- and middle-income people in the U.S.
“ACORN is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now,” O’Keefe’s voice-over explains as the shaky camera focuses on a banner bearing the nonprofit’s logo. “ACORN has goals including the registration of new voters and the advocacy of affordable housing.”
Abruptly, the camera cuts to Giles in a halter top and barely-there sarong. Over the course of the video, Giles asks ACORN staff to help her figure out taxes for a prostitution business. Slowly, their story grows darker: O’Keefe, posing as Giles’ boyfriend and an aspiring politician, tells a volunteer they plan to bring 15-year-old Salvadoran girls across the border to work at the brothel, then use the profits for his campaign. A volunteer recommends using the “performing arts” designation for the business, claiming the underage sex workers as dependents or exchange students, and teaching the girls to “keep their mouth shut.” The two-part video ends, absurdly, with O’Keefe and Giles strutting their stuff down the National Mall, with O’Keefe in a pinstripe suit, fedora, and sunglasses, pimp cane in hand and his grandmother’s chinchilla stole draped over his narrow shoulders.
O’Keefe and Giles repeated the trick at six different ACORN offices with similar results, then shopped the footage around. When Andrew Breitbart, who helped develop the Drudge Report in the Nineties and co-founded the Huffington Post in the aughts, saw what O’Keefe had, he bit — hard. The footage was perfect for his new Breitbart spinoff, BigGovernment.com.
He wants you to be a propaganda vessel for him, says a former employee.
The ACORN videos detonated like an atom bomb into the American political consciousness. A week after the first video dropped, congresspeople on both sides of the aisle voted to defund ACORN in response. O’Keefe and Giles became instant media sensations, especially on Fox News. “This is who these people are,” O’Keefe told Sean Hannity. “We’re exposing their soul.”
What O’Keefe and Giles actually exposed, according to an independent investigation commissioned by ACORN, was an organization that grew too fast and insufficiently trained its frontline workers: a big problem, but not a soul-deep one. The investigation also found that O’Keefe and Giles left out some important details — two of the six offices they visited called the police after they left to report their stated criminal intentions. The California attorney general investigated three ACORN offices and found the videos “were heavily edited to feature only the worst or most inappropriate statements of the various ACORN employees and to omit some of the most salient statements by O’Keefe and Giles.” By then, it was too late to matter. Buried under bad publicity and stripped of government funding, ACORN dissolved its American operations in April 2010.
Giles receded from the spotlight, got married, and settled down, but O’Keefe had found his calling. Breitbart provided O’Keefe with a steady paycheck, which he immediately used to target Louisiana’s Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu by dressing up his friends as telephone repairmen to film a sting at her office. The ruse landed him in a New Orleans jail on felony phone-tampering charges, which the court eventually reduced to unlawfully entering federal property.
Breitbart stood by his young protégé during the ensuing media frenzy, but even his support faltered when, several months later, O’Keefe allegedly attempted to lure a female CNN reporter onto a boat festooned with sex toys, pornographic posters, a ceiling mirror, and hidden cameras. The plan, according to emails between collaborators, was for O’Keefe to mock-seduce her. But O’Keefe’s then-assistant warned the reporter about the scheme when she arrived at the office. The would-be Casanova copped to a plan that involved strawberries and champagne but denied any dildos; he claimed he considered the scheme but ultimately decided against moving forward with it.
O’Keefe’s nautical stunt earned him conservative opprobrium; his New Orleans caper ended up earning him probation after he pleaded guilty to the reduced charges. Until 2013, O’Keefe wasn’t allowed to leave his home state of New Jersey without permission. His on-camera career seemed over almost before it had begun.
One month after the conviction, O’Keefe launched Project Veritas. If he couldn’t travel to find stories, he’d find people who could.
Launching Veritas
IN 2010, O’KEEFE incorporated Project Veritas in Virginia as a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, able to receive tax-free donations, but subject to more rules than for-profits. The organization relied mostly on volunteer labor until 2012, when O’Keefe put himself and one other on payroll. By the end of 2021, that number had grown to nearly 60.
Project Veritas eventually established a headquarters in Westchester, New York. Inside the signless beige building where the group settled, a shadow box displayed O’Keefe’s sunglasses, fedora, and chinchilla stole. A Wall of Shame featured news organizations and articles forced to issue a correction of their Project Veritas coverage alongside a large portrait of their mascot, Retracto the Correction Alpaca. A conference room featured a framed poster of one of O’Keefe’s greatest and most unlikely inspirations: Saul Alinsky, a 1970s radical community organizer and conservative boogeyman du jour of the late aughts.
O’Keefe often says Alinsky’s tactical handbook of political warfare, Rules for Radicals, inspired much of his revolutionary approach to journalism. Project Veritas’ focus on the discrepancy between public and private action comes from Rule Four: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Their mocking tone reflects Rule Five: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” His weeks-long assaults on enemy institutions? Rule 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Every subject is an enemy, every story is a war.
O’Keefe has always understood that this strategy works best on film. Hidden-camera footage, with its odd angles and shaky focus, transforms the viewer into a voyeur, the subjects into conspirators, and private conversation into portentous secrets.
Tax-exempt nonprofits are supposed to be apolitical; a surprising descriptor for an organization that almost exclusively targets the liberal establishment. Still, O’Keefe and most of his former employees insist their coverage is objective.
“We’re not right-wing activists,” Christian Hartsock, former chief investigative reporter at Veritas, tells me. “We have libertarians, we have independents.” If the organization primarily targets liberal institutions, he argues, it’s only because the media establishment refuses to hold them accountable. “Nature abhors a vacuum, doesn’t it? So we’re going to point our flashlights in the dark corners. No one else is looking.”
The hours at Project Veritas were always long. O’Keefe was hard to work for. People stayed because they wanted to expose a system they were already sure was rotten. And if the human cogs in that wretched liberal machine would only admit their hypocrisy and malfeasance through trickery and entrapment, then those methods were not only justified, but also necessary.
“We’re at war right now,” Hartsock says. “As long as we’re in the information-war stage of this decline of our civilization, this is the most effective method for smuggling the truth to the American people, for opening people’s eyes. James is the one who professionalized it … and he deserves all the credit for that.”
A Bust Gone Bust
IN EARLY 2011, NPR executives Ron Schiller and Betsy Liley walked into Cafe Milano, an Italian restaurant and popular schmoozing spot in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown, where Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik greeted them. The two men represented the Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC), which promoted “a proper understanding of Islam” through donations to schools and universities, and were there to discuss a possible $5 million donation to NPR. Over the course of their two-hour lunch, conversation wandered into American politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Schiller described some Tea Party members as “anti-intellectual” Islamophobic gun nuts, and appeared to admit NPR had an anti-Israel bias. He also seemed unfazed when Malik and Kasaam revealed their funding comes from the Muslim Brotherhood.
Malik, whose real name is Oluwaseun “Shaughn” Adeleye, and Kasaam, who goes by the pseudonym Simon Templar, did not represent MEAC, which never existed; they didn’t receive funding from the Muslim Brotherhood, but from O’Keefe and their own bank accounts. O’Keefe said he provided training, wearable cameras, and video editing, then released the finished product under the Project Veritas banner. Schiller came across as both biased and unprofessional, and several mainstream outlets credulously reported the story. NPR immediately went into damage control; Rob Schiller and NPR CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation) both resigned the day after the video dropped, and Liley went on administrative leave.
We’re at war right now, says Veritas reporter Christian Hartsock.
These results were great for Veritas, but Templar was furious. He felt O’Keefe had inflated his role in the operation, which Templar claimed was Adeleye’s idea, and that, in his hunger for fame, O’Keefe published it before they could complete their actual objective: demonstrating how easily radical Islamist groups could influence American institutions. The duo had hoped to hit universities and other media outlets, pushing until the organizations explicitly agreed to take the money. But once O’Keefe blew their cover, further operations became impossible.
Worse yet, comparisons between the footage Veritas released and the uncut sting video made it clear that O’Keefe had not told the full story. While Schiller did express personal bias, his defense of the Republican Party was cut, as well as repeated explanations that donors are never allowed to influence NPR coverage. The outlets that reported the video’s claims without performing due diligence were embarrassed. It would take five years for Veritas to break into national headlines again.
Wariness of Project Veritas extended beyond the liberal media establishment. The combination of O’Keefe’s knockout blow against ACORN and the double gut punch of the Landrieu arrest and Love Boat scandal made it clear to the pre-Trump conservative movement that O’Keefe was both an asset and a liability — effective but sleazy. Veritas videos were welcome on the conservative-news circuit. O’Keefe, for the most part, was not.
Project Veritas spent the next five years engaged in trench warfare with a laundry list of conservative bêtes noires: teachers’ unions, establishment media, college professors, social-welfare programs, Hollywood liberal elites, and, most frequently, the specter of voter fraud. Donors seemed to appreciate the choice of targets; according to tax documents, the organization’s revenue grew from less than $400,000 in 2011 to $3.7 million in 2015. Some of that money came from influential conservative figures; Eric O’Keefe (no relation), a longtime right-wing operative closely affiliated with the Koch brothers, reportedly donated $50,000 in 2013; the Mercers, well-known for funding far-right causes, gave $25,000 the year before. Much of the funding Project Veritas received between 2011 and 2015, however, came from DonorsTrust, a conservative “donor-advised fund” that functions as a dark-money pipeline between anonymous benefactors and the causes they support. In 2015, the fund contributed nearly half of Project Veritas’ total revenue.
Mainstream attention, nevertheless, seemed out of reach — at least until a man O’Keefe has called “a kindred spirit” rode down his golden escalator and began to remake the party in his image.
Donald Trump and O’Keefe first met in 2013 at Trump Tower where, according to O’Keefe’s second book, American Pravda, Trump complimented his ACORN takedown, then asked him to break into Columbia University. Trump had heard rumors that Obama’s admission records listed his birthplace as Kenya, and he wanted the records to confirm it. O’Keefe politely declined — “We were journalists, not private eyes” — and the two men continued to talk for half an hour. As they shook hands and parted, Trump whispered, “Do Columbia.” Trump’s foundation ended up donating $10,000 to Project Veritas one month before he announced his 2016 campaign and gave the organization another $10,000 by year’s end.
A year and a half later, Project Veritas created a beautiful October surprise for the future president: footage of Clinton staffers appearing to describe illegal coordination between the campaign and Super PACs, to consider voter-fraud schemes proposed by an undercover Veritas agent, and to detail a national network of agitators paid to provoke MAGA supporters into violence at rallies.
“They’re telling people to go out and start fistfights and start violence,” Trump said at the third presidential debate a few days after the story’s release. And just like that, Project Veritas’ five-year exile from mainstream media was over. Trump’s victory sent the company rocketing skyward. In 2017, Project Veritas’ revenue almost doubled; between 2018 and 2020, it nearly tripled. O’Keefe was a hero, a rock star, a MAGA-movement Icarus soaring toward the sun.
Ashley Biden’s Diary
AS THE 2020 election approached, Project Veritas launched operation Diamond Dog: a massive, nationwide investigation into mail-in-voting fraud. Then, less than 24 hours after the election, Veritas released an interview with a U.S. Postal Service worker in Michigan who claimed his supervisor ordered him to forge — or backdate — an earlier postmark date, on late mail-in ballots: a nonsensical claim, since Michigan doesn’t count ballots that arrive after 8 p.m. on Election Day regardless of postmarks. Undeterred, Veritas tried again two days later, this time with a Pennsylvania USPS worker who claimed he overheard his postmaster issue a similar order. After interrogation by an inspector general, however, the postal worker recanted his claims. The postmaster sued Project Veritas for defamation; after settling out of court, Veritas stated it had no evidence of election fraud in Pennsylvania.
The most serious legal trouble Project Veritas ever faced, however, came from something it did not publish: the diary of Joe Biden’s youngest daughter, Ashley Biden, one of several items purchased for $40,000 from two Floridians who eventually pleaded guilty to stealing it. The diary turned out to be the tortured ramblings of a recovering drug addict: all tabloid, no substance. To the fury of many employees, O’Keefe spiked the “indefensible” story in a staff email. But O’Keefe’s lawyers also wrote the Biden campaign and tried to strong-arm them into an interview. Biden’s lawyers rejected the ultimatum, and reported the diary’s theft to federal authorities, who began investigating Veritas for allegedly transporting stolen goods over state lines.
In November 2021, the FBI conducted pre-dawn raids on O’Keefe and two other employees. A few months later, Project Veritas learned the FBI had secretly subpoenaed Google, Microsoft, and Apple for emails and browsing data for several employees starting in November 2020. The raids and subpoenas allowed the FBI to collect data beyond the scope of the diary case and alarmed First Amendment advocates. The ACLU, Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation all condemned the seizures and issued heavily qualified statements of support.
It was the group’s largest taste of mainstream acceptance since the 2011 NPR sting. And it might explain why, in the spring of 2022, O’Keefe began to court people able to take the company in a more serious direction, including Goldman Sachs alum Daniel Strack, who became the executive director, and former Fox News producer Pamela Browne, tapped to make longer-form, documentary-style content.
Donors helped O’Keefe score a few meetings with CNN executives, according to Strack; nothing came of them, but that wasn’t the point. “Early in his career, [O’Keefe] definitely considered himself an activist. And then he wanted to become a journalist,” Strack tells me. To do this, they’d have to break out of the “conservative ghetto,” a term Strack attributes to O’Keefe.
Content-wise, however, Veritas was still doing what it’s always done: picking subjects most likely to provide fodder for the latest crop of hot-button conservative issues, then unleashing Alinsky’s rules upon them. On Jan. 25, 2023, they hit a home run with undercover footage of a Pfizer executive appearing to admit the company purposefully mutates Covid-19 in the name of developing new vaccines. The truth is very complicated and hardly the health risk implied by the framing, but the simplified and sensational version went viral: more than 30 million X (then Twitter) impressions and 800,000 YouTube views before the platform removed the video for vaccine misinformation. It was, O’Keefe claimed, the group’s most successful video yet.
It would also be the last Project Veritas video O’Keefe ever released.
Let’s Talk About Inurement
THE TRUMP ERA was kind to Project Veritas. Its 59 employees in late 2021 represented a 300 percent increase in its workforce since 2014; its revenue expanded by 750 percent. The executive structure, however, remained mostly unchanged from those early days. O’Keefe served as both CEO and chairman of the board of directors.
Most newsrooms operate as for-profit corporations, but Project Veritas has never been most newsrooms. Its status as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization exempts it from paying taxes and allows it to run on donations rather than ad revenue, but also imposes restrictions on how it can use donations. Nonprofits must reinvest excess revenue back into the business — while executives can and often do pull hefty salaries, personal use of foundation resources, or inurement, can cost the nonprofit its tax-exempt status. Inurement can take the form of low-interest loans or personal use of the company car. For O’Keefe, it took the form of musical theater.
On Aug. 19, 2021, as the sun crept toward the horizon, the audience took their seats at the Mount Rouge farm in Roseland, Virginia. There, riding in from stage left: O’Keefe on a horse, wearing a cowboy hat and chaps, belting out the opening lyrics of Oklahoma!. It was opening night of a three-weekend run of the production, which cast O’Keefe as the lead. This meant a three-week stay in Virginia for O’Keefe and most of the production staff as well. At one point, O’Keefe bused in half the staff to Virginia to see the show.
“Was there some work done for Project Veritas, stories that they were doing remotely? Yes. Was most of it just supporting James doing his Oklahoma! thing? Yes,” Strack tells me. Employees filmed the production and worked on a behind-the-scenes documentary, which was never published. Strack, who began his tenure eight months after Oklahoma! wrapped, is nonetheless familiar with the details because he helped hash out how much money O’Keefe needed to pay the company to avoid falling afoul of IRS restrictions.
As it turned out, Oklahoma! was just the tip of the inurement iceberg. According to a financial audit released by the board in the spring of 2023, O’Keefe had, between 2021 and 2023, spent $209,000 on chauffeured “black car” services. He belonged to a yacht club, where he hosted company events so he could meet the club’s spending requirements. In 2019, O’Keefe got engaged and placed a deposit on a wedding venue. When the engagement fell through, he held the Veritas Christmas party at the venue instead so he could pay himself back with company funds. On one occasion, he used Veritas’ money to charter a $12,000 helicopter and $1,400 black car for personal use. O’Keefe claimed these trips were primarily for meeting donors. Hinckley, who met O’Keefe at his destination, disputes this.
Everybody feared the consequences, says Veritas reporter Bobby Harr.
I asked an expert on nonprofit jurisprudence, Notre Dame law professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, whether O’Keefe’s behavior placed the company at risk of an IRS audit or loss of 501(c)(3) status. Mayer wasn’t concerned about the chauffeur service; if the board presented a united face, it could convince the IRS it was necessary. “It’s one thing to spend extravagantly,” Mayer says. “It’s very different to spend nonprofit resources on personal expenses.” Things like chartering transportation for personal use, the yacht-club events, and the wedding-venue clawback, he says, are blatantly illegal. Mayer doubts the IRS would have revoked the 501(c)(3) status based on the expenditures, but it would have likely held O’Keefe and any board member who knew about the illegal activity liable for the money spent, plus fines. The Justice Department could impose more stringent penalties at the state level.
Legality aside, many employees quietly resented O’Keefe’s use of corporate assets, especially after the company let several people go in 2022. “It was very discreet and quiet, but behind the scenes, nobody was in favor of James spending all this time and all these company resources to go do his Oklahoma! play,” Bobby Harr, the undercover journalist who recorded the Twitter executive, says. “Everybody was silent about it because they feared the consequences.”
According to many employees, O’Keefe had a habit of publicly humiliating anyone who upset him and berating employees for not meeting unrealistic expectations. “There was a sort of fear that would strike across the room whenever James would walk by,” Harr says. One employee insists this was not a problem, but many others are adamant that O’Keefe constantly belittled people in front of their peers and held grudges.
As outside pressures mounted, O’Keefe’s temper grew worse. A $20 million company does not handle like a $5 million one, but O’Keefe refused to delegate. “It was his biggest complaint. He felt like he always did everything,” Strack says. Most people I interviewed say O’Keefe was good at raising money, drawing an audience, and setting a creative agenda for the company, but was terrible at management. Strack and O’Keefe discussed separating the business side of Project Veritas from the creative many times. “He’s really good at talking about all that stuff,” Strack says. “But when you go to implement it, he doesn’t do it.”
This toxic combination of micromanagement, eggshell-walking, and the long hours led to massive attrition. In a recorded meeting, the HR director said that between 2016 and 2023, when Veritas employed between 38 and 59 people, 139 employees left the company: a turnover rate of more than 250 percent during that period.
By the time the Pfizer video dropped on Jan. 25, 2023, the office felt like a ticking time bomb. On Feb. 2, it exploded.
The Groundhog Day Massacre
THE END OF O’Keefe and Veritas began on Feb. 2 with what Chief Strategy Officer Barry Hinckley would eventually christen the Groundhog Day massacre. At a morning meeting, O’Keefe ordered the fundraising team to use more aggressive tactics. The team, led by Hinckley, pushed back against an approach they believed would alienate potential donors, and O’Keefe erupted in a rage.
The meeting ended, but O’Keefe’s bad day was just starting. According to Strack and a Project Veritas board member, Chief Financial Officer Tom O’Hara uncovered yet another instance of inurement: the $12,000 helicopter chartered for private travel. O’Hara confronted O’Keefe, resulting in the second shouting match of the day.
The next day, O’Keefe unilaterally fired Hinckley and O’Hara. Firing Hinckley may not have been wise, but at least it was legal. O’Hara, however, had been hired by the board, and, according to Virginia law (where Project Veritas is incorporated), only the board could legally fire him. The board called an emergency meeting for Feb. 6 and began discussing its options.
Meanwhile, the freshly fired Hinckley sent a text to the fundraising team’s Signal chat. “Last night I stood up to a bully and got fired,” it read, then he quoted the organization’s motto: “Be brave. Do something.” About 25 Veritas employees — almost half the company — took Hinckley’s advice and formed a “revolutionaries” group chat. Striking was on the table. Ultimately, they decided to compile a list of office dysfunction into a letter for O’Keefe and the board.
Some of those thoughts were pure catharsis, like the first bullet point: “James has become a power drunk tyrant.” Others were just bizarre: “At Democracy Partners trial, in public, I was yelled at in front of jurors because he was hungry and then he took the eight-months-pregnant woman’s sandwich.” Most, though, suggested a highly toxic work environment — from donors being alienated by O’Keefe’s aggressive tactics and rudeness to employees being forced to take polygraph tests in an attempt to find a company mole. The employees compiled everything into a PDF document, then sent it to the board.
After years of serious conversations and apologies and plans that went nowhere, the board had arrived at the Rubicon. “[O’Keefe] cannot be a steward of the org until he recognizes the org is now bigger than him,” Matt Tyrmand, a board member and longtime friend to the CEO, wrote to the others in an email. “This is not a fiefdom anymore.”
Jeffrey Lichtman, who served as legal counsel, had reservations. “Giving James some kind of ultimatum will be received poorly by him at this very difficult time. He’ll feel cornered and will lash out in defense. In the end I’m not sure you won’t lose him.”
End of the O’Keefe Era
ON THE MORNING of Feb. 6, O’Hara, Strack, and O’Keefe walked into the conference room and dialed into the Skype meeting that O’Keefe would later describe as “a six-hour Maoist ‘struggle session.’ ” I listened to it — and it sounded to me more like an intervention. Hartsock felt similarly when O’Keefe later gave him a recording. “I kept listening, trying to force myself to get mad. But what I heard was employees saying very gingerly, very carefully sandwiching concerns with flattery and with reassurances to James, that we love you.”
O’Keefe came to the meeting with a solution of his own: an open-door policy so employees could air their grievances (which, the board told him, was already corporate policy) and a letter of apology sent to employees, which he read out loud to the board: “Many of you who have been with me for years know this is not the first time I’ve gotten emotional and impulsive during times of strain. I hope I can count on your grace, your forgiveness, and your continued dedication to Project Veritas as we work together.”
Over the next four hours, 12 employees joined the call to tell their stories. If the board hoped hearing from his employees would make O’Keefe see things their way, it was mistaken. When he finally spoke, his voice was tight with emotion. He promised to “work with professionals on the behavioral issues.” “My essence, my soul is so tied into this place,” he said. “And those things I will change, because I have to change them. Because if I don’t change them, we’re going to lose Project Veritas.”
Then there was silence. The board already knew where it was going with its decision; it was, at last, prepared to pull the trigger.
The board reinstated Hinckley and O’Hara, stripped O’Keefe of hiring and firing authority for 180 days, and revoked his company credit card. He received two weeks of mandatory paid leave from his position as CEO, but remained both CEO and chairman of the board for the time being.
O’Keefe went dark. No social media posts, even as someone leaked the employee letter and rumors spread of a Pfizer-backed coup or communist takeover. When the board reached out, he replied that he was on mandatory vacation and would not be responding. This was a far bigger problem as the board needed to hash out the new shape of Project Veritas quickly. When the silence persisted, they voted 3-2 to remove O’Keefe as chairman, indefinitely suspend him as CEO, and provide him with mental-health services.
Office life devolved into chaos. Factions formed almost immediately: letter signers versus loyalists, headquarters staff versus field operatives, all accusing one another of leaking information to the press. Many stopped coming into the office altogether. Work virtually ceased.
On Feb. 15 — nine days after the meeting — presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a picture of himself and O’Keefe hiking in Santa Monica. The next day, O’Keefe broke his silence and issued an ultimatum: He would only return if everyone on the board and in the C-suite resigned by Feb. 20, when his paid leave ended. He didn’t wait around for the board’s inevitable rejection; the day after his ultimatum, he incorporated a new for-profit entity, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG), then went on to allegedly contact donors using the company fundraising lists he had been barred from accessing by the board. Project Veritas sued O’Keefe for breach of contract that May; the lawsuit is ongoing.
My soul is so tied into this place, says O’Keefe about Project Veritas.
The day of the ultimatum, O’Keefe met a small group of employees in his office for a farewell speech recorded for those unable to attend. The Feb. 6 meeting, he told them, was a coup. The timing of it — just after the Pfizer story — struck him as odd. At the end, he announced his decision. There was no place for him here. He would start over. “I’m not done,” he said. “ I’ll need a bunch of people around me, and I’ll make sure you know how to find me.”
“This, to me, was the turning point,” senior producer Kalen Eriksson, who was there for the speech, tells me. “I knew, right there in the room, certain instances he was blatantly mischaracterizing.” And “not two hours after I left, the video was ‘leaked’ to Jack Posobiec and Tim Pool.” Pool uploaded the video to YouTube, and Eriksson says O’Keefe sent that video to the same distribution list he used for official releases.
Declarations of loyalty poured in: Pool, Posobiec, Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr., Lauren Boebert, Dan Bongino, Mike Cernovich, Catturd, Alex Jones, and countless other political personalities broadcast their unconditional support for O’Keefe.
“$14,000 on a charter flight to meet someone to fix his boat under the guise of meeting with a donor,” Pool said to his Timcast IRL audience after the farewell address dropped. “Sorry, I just literally don’t believe it. That just sounds like nonsense.”
Two days after the video “leak,” Project Veritas had lost nearly 100,000 of its YouTube subscribers and 300,000 Twitter followers. Donors demanded their contributions back; some threatened to sue Project Veritas for violating its chartered mission.
As Veritas struggled to reorient itself, O’Keefe prepared to move forward. He hosted meetings with select employees at his parents’ carriage house, where Project Veritas began, to begin again once more. When OMG launched on the Ides of March (an odd choice for a deposed Caesar), the cold war turned hot. Paranoia back at Veritas spiked, and accusations of surreptitious recordings flew. At one point, O’Keefe returned to his Veritas office to retrieve his birth certificate from his gun safe while Strack monitored his actions. As the founder began narrating his actions to no one, then attempted to pick a fight with Strack, the COO suspected O’Keefe was recording audio. The deception didn’t bother Strack too much: He, too, was secretly recording.
Between February and June of 2023, Project Veritas released several videos, including a multipart attack on gender-affirming care. The videos were as on-brand as it gets. All they got in return, though, was: “Where’s James?”
“We’re showing you videos of pedophiles. We’re exposing groomers. We’re exposing crony capitalists,” Hartsock says, exasperated. “James always said content is king. Can content be king, please?”
By June, the answer to that question was clear. Without donations, Project Veritas would have to shutter operations in a few short months. If they wanted it to survive, they needed to find a new king, and fast.
The New Veritas
“HI, I’M HANNAH Giles, and I’ve just been named CEO of Project Veritas.”
She stands in front of rolling green hills and a gray sky that hints at storms to come. “You might remember me as the 20-year-old reporter who wore a sarong and stilettos in the landmark ACORN investigation.”
Giles had married Joe Basel, another O’Keefe co-conspirator and one of the telephone repairman impersonators arrested for the Landrieu phone caper, in December 2010. In her time away from the spotlight, Giles founded the American Phoenix Foundation, a nonprofit that, according to the video, trained citizen journalists. “I’m honored and humbled to now lead this team into a new era,” she says.
On the surface, not only did Giles seem perfect for the CEO role, she seemed like the only person who could fill it. “ ‘If there’s no James, there’s no PV’ is what the mantra was among the James cultists,” Hartsock says. “This is the perfect rebuttal: There’s no James without Hannah Giles. I mean, she came up with the ACORN thing.” The board appointed Giles interim CEO in early June. For the first time in a long time, employees felt hopeful.
That hope proved short-lived. Strack says the first thing Giles did was order the employees to drop what they were doing and debunk many videos O’Keefe had produced, which Strack and the rest of the employees flatly refused to do. Strack says Giles responded by cutting him out of email communication. Shortly thereafter, he says, she strong-armed the board into appointing her permanent CEO on the grounds that donors were reluctant to sign checks if the board might kick her out after 90 days. Strack, who was adamant about separating the CEO position from creative control, was stunned. He offered his resignation.
Around this time, employees learned that Giles’ old venture, the American Phoenix Foundation, did not primarily train citizen journalists across the country, though it raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so. Instead, APF used the money to record more than 800 hours of undercover footage of Texas state legislators in an attempt to catch them behaving badly, loudly announced its success, and gave the footage to Breitbart News, which ultimately published none of it. Lawyer and lobbyist Steve Bresnan filed suit to force APF to obtain the organization’s donor information and financial records, and found evidence of hundreds of thousands of dollars unaccounted for and large, unjustified payments to Ben Wetmore, a former O’Keefe associate closely affiliated with Giles’ business ventures, including Project Veritas.
Wetmore denies the allegations in the lawsuit and says Giles did bring in donations to Veritas. (Giles didn’t respond to requests to comment for this story.) Wetmore tells me: “You’re hearing from a chorus of haters who’ve unfortunately let the events of 2023 cloud their vision from what’s really at stake here — getting back to the mission of producing great journalism.”
Giles had a funny way of getting back to that mission. Project Veritas undercover journalists run a high risk of lawsuits, and the organization has always promised to pay for their defense. In a closed-door meeting, Hartsock says, Giles quietly revoked that indemnification. “We had undercover journalists operating in the field under our direction,” he tells me, “[who] weren’t being told that if they got arrested or sued, they’d have to pay their own legal bills.”
The decision worked retroactively, as well. Project Veritas stopped paying legal bills for the two employees who got raided by the FBI. When the checks stopped coming, O’Keefe stepped up and began paying the costs out of his own pocket. “It’s very rare in this business that somebody would do that for their purported co-conspirators,” says Jeff Lichtman, who represents both employees, along with O’Keefe. “That just doesn’t happen.”
“The deep state and federal government’s lawfare against [Veritas] took a toll,” Wetmore says when asked about the decision. “It is an ongoing discussion on how to handle the massive litigation costs.”
In August, Giles began to lay off the majority of Project Veritas’ workforce; by the end of the layoffs, just 11 employees remained. By the end of September, Project Veritas suspended operations indefinitely. Giles resigned as CEO in December, citing “strong evidence of past illegality and past financial improprieties.” Wetmore took over. The group releases a few videos per month, which average 15,000 YouTube views. Before O’Keefe left, they frequently broke 100,000 views. The operation calling itself Project Veritas is, in reality, somewhere between a ghost and a corpse.
From a business perspective, the rapid decline made no sense. The CEO changed, but the market remained the same and most of the talent remained at the company. Looking at things that way, Gavin McInnes tells me, was Project Veritas’ biggest mistake.
“I don’t think you guys realize that this is General Patton, and you’re at war,” he says. “They were basically commandos. They were green berets. And I think they thought they were working at Starbucks.”
McInnes briefly volunteered for Project Veritas in 2010, and he and O’Keefe remained friends after his departure. Even if the board and employees are telling the truth about O’Keefe, he says, it doesn’t matter. In times of war, the price of mutiny is death.
“I don’t think you can run MS-13 without El Chapo or the Hells Angels without Sonny Barger,” McInnes says. “And I was proven right, because what happens as soon as they chop the head off a snake? It regrows a body, and they die of starvation.”
El Chapo never ran MS-13 and snake biology doesn’t work that way, but other than that McInnes is essentially correct. Project Veritas starved to death, and O’Keefe’s OMG continues to release content. But the content has degraded — and so has O’Keefe.
O’Keefe’s Next Chapter
THE PROMO VIDEO begins with an aggressive, crotch-level thrust of a gasoline nozzle into the gas tank of a Lamborghini. “Coming Tomorrow” flashes across the screen as Usher’s “OMG” plays — it’s a teaser for OMG’s “biggest story yet.” The Lambo stops to reveal O’Keefe in the driver’s seat, smirking next to a gorgeous brunette. This is Pariah the Doll, a trans It girl of New York City’s anti-woke, arthouse Dimes Square. This video drops two weeks after Giles takes over at Project Veritas, and O’Keefe is going full bore on the phallic imagery. A clip of artillery firing rockets, then back to O’Keefe spraying champagne. O’Keefe throws money in the air, cigar clamped in his teeth in a conscious parody of douchiness — or, at least, I hope it’s conscious.
O’Keefe had plans for OMG that went well beyond Project Veritas 2.0. He envisioned a decentralized empire of citizen journalists across the country — “the Uber of Journalism,” as he put it to podcast host Jack Posobiec — where would-be citizen journalists could sign up for O’Keefe Academy and buy a master class on undercover reporting for $497. They could buy or lease hidden cameras and sell scoops to OMG: $3,000 per story, with a bonus if that story went viral. I saw a website-development proposal describing a social-media-style platform where paying members could post their scoops, which could then be picked up by OMG or other news outlets.
Supporters could pay $20 per month for paywalled content, or they could become a founding member for anywhere between $500 (Bronze Tier) and $15,000 (Ambassador Tier). Within the first 24 hours of the website going live, OMG sold half a million dollars’ worth of subscriptions. The website is still live, but there’s no social media platform, and OMG stopped uploading content there in November 2023. OMG now uses YouTube and X to post videos which, for the first time in O’Keefe’s career, feature sponsorships.
James always said content is king, says Hartsock about O’Keefe.
A lot of OMG’s content is old news. There’s the investigation of potentially shady donation practices by ActBlue and WinRed, which The New York Times reported on two years prior. There’s the “White House insider” caught on hidden camera seeming to claim that Vice President Kamala Harris can’t keep Black staff; Politico reported in 2022 about Black staffers leaving. Other stories, especially ones recorded during “dates” with undercover journalists, seem to feature employees inflating their own importance, as with the self-professed low-level CIA contractor who claimed that three-letter agencies withheld classified information from Trump during his term and that the CIA is currently monitoring Trump’s communications. Trump found the story compelling enough to make a video response, and Rep. Matt Gaetz has petitioned the House for an investigation into the claims.
Between five and 10 Project Veritas employees followed O’Keefe to OMG and quickly became disillusioned, with some complaining of long hours and low pay. In February, O’Keefe posted a job ad to X that conveys the OMG work-life balance: “Must be completely fearless, willing to live out of a suitcase, work 12 hours a day, travel constantly.” O’Keefe’s decision to visit Bohemian Grove, a private campground for wealthy and powerful men and a locus of many conspiracy theories, prompted an exodus. By the beginning of 2024, almost no one who followed O’Keefe from Project Veritas still worked at OMG.
Bad blood flows beneath all the burning bridges. After founding OMG, O’Keefe received anonymous harassing texts: often obscene, always aggressive. A few of them made their way onto social media, where one board member gleefully reposted them. Supporters of O’Keefe received similar treatment: When an employee who followed O’Keefe to OMG criticized Project Veritas, a former co-worker shared intimate details of his marital issues and his wife’s mental health (since deleted). Two X accounts posted intimate texts between O’Keefe and his girlfriend, Alexandra Rose of Selling the OC.
A recently leaked video shows O’Keefe and a male companion attempting to elicit information from a 20-year-old they believed worked for Sen. Chuck Schumer. The woman was falling-down drunk and aggressively sexual toward the two men, who responded by buying her more drinks and encouraging her to flash them. A few former fans were scandalized. Most remained indifferent. As O’Keefe put it to Eriksson during their final text conversation: “Content is king, but people follow people.”
What It All Meant
“THE RIGHT NOWADAYS are super focused on idols,” one former undercover journalist tells me. “I think a lot of us from Project Veritas are seeing that now.”
When I visited the office in 2022, O’Keefe gave me his personal annotated copy of Custodians of Conscience, by James Ettema and Theodore Glasser, a well-respected book about the role investigative journalism plays in establishing and enforcing morality, and the tension between the ideal of objective journalism and the outrage against injustice that most investigative pieces seek to provoke. It’s on my bookshelf still.
“We would investigate the sacred cows, the monoliths that thought they couldn’t be touched,” the former employee continues. “And then here we go on the right and erect our own sacred cows and monoliths that can’t be touched. James O’Keefe can do no wrong.”
The idea that anyone could see O’Keefe as not merely a journalist, but the last journalist — the only man brave enough to hold the powerful to account — might seem ridiculous from a left-wing perspective. Based on my interactions with O’Keefe, he genuinely believes this to be the case. Even one-on-one, he spoke to me the way the protagonist of a play might, complete with monologues and an unshakable certainty that this story ends with the triumph of good (himself) over evil (everyone who has ever wronged him). He welcomes intellectual disagreement because it affirms his self-image as intellectual; he tolerated my criticisms because they affirmed his identity as a journalist. I enjoyed my occasional dinners with him in the same way Steve Irwin seems to have enjoyed his crocodiles. Ultimately, he declined to comment for this article.
Many Project Veritas employees bought into the O’Keefe mythos. And a lot of his fans still do.
“I think in the right’s push to win the culture war, they unknowingly sacrificed a lot of their values,” the former employee says.
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals refers to targets and enemies, counterattacks and threats. This is not the language of traditional journalism — which investigates facts and strives for understanding — but of war, which annihilates its target by any means necessary. Journalism as combat short-circuits empathy and renders nuance impossible. It makes for a simplistic story flattened to the point of dishonesty.
Project Veritas — and most of the conservative movement today — starts from the assumption that every individual and organization associated with the liberal establishment is secretly corrupt. They lie to the American people and tell the truth behind closed doors. Veritas did not mount investigations to discover whether ACORN is corrupt or whether Twitter censors conservatives; they mounted investigations to find proof for these things they were already convinced were true. This proof usually took the form of impropriety by someone within the target organization, which they presented as evidence that the entire organization, along with the ideology behind it, was irredeemable. A handful of poorly trained staffers at ACORN who exhibited staggeringly poor judgment became proof ACORN supported undocumented underage sex trafficking. A Twitter executive blowing off steam over drinks became proof Twitter itself had a vendetta against Musk. Whether or not these conclusions are true, Project Veritas videos proved neither.
But what happens if a conservative hero turns out to be a poor manager or spends nonprofit money on private helicopter trips?
“If [we] had, during [our] infiltration of the Katie Hobbs campaign, found out that Katie Hobbs had a $12,000 down payment on a wedding venue, but that the engagement broke off and Katie Hobbs had the campaign reimburse her for it by holding a campaign Christmas party at the venue … James’ mouth would have been watering,” Hartsock says.
Ten years ago, O’Keefe’s actions might have been exactly that kind of deal-breaker, but the world has changed since then. Most conservative culture warriors no longer perceive the U.S. political divide as two factions that disagree with each other, but as a war between real Americans and godless communists working to destroy the country. The conservative worldview allows for the idea that Pfizer orchestrated a coup to destroy Project Veritas, or an employee pool that suddenly went woke. It doesn’t allow for the possibility that O’Keefe was himself corrupted by money, ego, and power.
The Westchester headquarters may be mostly empty now, but the paranoid animal spirits of Project Veritas live on.
This story has been updated to reflect that it was Hinkley, and not a board member, who disputes that helicopter trips were primarily for meeting donors.
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