James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, left the organization in February. It has fallen on hard times in the months since. Photo by Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via AP.
In the months since James O’Keefe’s dramatic departure from Project Veritas earlier this year, the conservative group has spiraled out of control as it weathers mass layoffs and board member resignations under the leadership of Hannah Giles, who took the helm in June.
Mediaite obtained audio from an August 22 meeting between Giles, Project Veritas board president Joe Barton, and several staffers. At the meeting, held just days after 23 staffers were fired and two resigned, Giles can be heard explaining that the organization is in financial ruin.
“It’s devastating,” Giles said. “I’ve got to get back into the bank accounts to see what’s real and what’s not real because I have been getting presented with things that were not making sense and then when I’m presented with okay there’s only a thousand dollars left in the 501(c) (3) and I thought we had until October. We did a half a million dollar transfer and that was this period. But, like, we’re bankrupt.”
Giles continued to paint a bleak financial portrait of the well-known conservative nonprofit that raked in $22 million of donor cash in one recent year.
“The bills that are owed and everything, and there’s lawyers threatening to like, to force us into bankruptcy, and come take all this stuff,” Giles said. “So, I do not want us, I do not want to declare bankruptcy or go into bankruptcy, but we have to imagine that’s where we’re at so how do we get to the point where we’re clawing our way out of that situation?”
“So, we’re under water?” one staffer asked. Giles responded: “Yeah.”
A recently departed Project Veritas staffer told Mediaite they believed Giles had mismanaged the organization since taking over in June. They said former CFO Tom O’Hara made clear that Project Veritas faced a grim outlook – which was ignored by Giles. The former staffer said O’Hara was “upfront about the dire state” the company is in, and cautioned Giles of the strong possibility that they were on the brink of bankruptcy.
“Since July, he was trying to convince the board to start considering a wind-down period in order to give employees enough notice — this was ignored,” the source said.
Another ex-staffer told Mediaite that Giles “lacked leadership skills” and suggested the board “did not do their due diligence” when they appointed her. “Her actual journalism experience is murky,” they said.
Giles did not respond to a request for comment.
O’Keefe launched Project Veritas in 2010, after his targeting of left-wing group ACORN led to its collapse. Giles herself gained fame in conservative media for her role as a “prostitute” to O’Keefe’s “pimp” in the ACORN video, an exposé that thrust Project Veritas into the spotlight for its highly controversial practices.
After O’Keefe’s exit in February of this year, Project Veritas launched an investigation into his use of funds. The Washington Post reported this week on an audit conducted by a law firm hired by the group which accused O’Keefe of using company cash for extravagant personal expenses – including $12,000 to charter a helicopter for a trip to Maine for a sailing trip, hundreds of thousands of dollars on high-end car service, and thousands on DJ equipment among other luxury items.
O’Keefe’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, told Mediaite that when O’Keefe was “forced out of Project Veritas in February of this year, they had between $6-8 million in their bank accounts. James had access to none of it. Six months later it’s apparently all gone. Instead of nameless sources blaming James for spending that money and bankrupting Project Veritas, perhaps their CEO and board of directors can let us all know how they blew through it all.”
Project Veritas, once heralded on the right for guerrilla-style tactics that toppled organizations like ACORN by scaring off donors, now finds itself on the precipice of a similar fate. A former member of the organization lamented: “James used to always tell us that Project Veritas would only be destroyed from within. That turned out to be true.”
“He chose to destroy and defame his company of over a decade and loyal team instead of reign in some excessive spending,” they said. “Hannah then put the final nail in the coffin with her prolific incompetence and sole ability to hire her friends as contractors to do very little work for high prices.”
Now, O’Keefe is looking to build a rival non-profit that staffers fear will threaten the already precarious position Project Veritas finds itself in. The desperation has given rise to rumors of a homecoming. At one point during the August meeting a staffer mentioned rumblings of O’Keefe possibly returning to Project Veritas, an idea Giles rejected.
“I can’t imagine a world where that happens,” she said. “Not under my — I would be gone.”
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