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.
Founded in 2010 by James O’Keefe, Project Veritas specializes in undercover and sting-style videos. O’Keefe was removed from his leadership role with Project Veritas in February, after employees signed a joint letter accusing him of being “a power-drunk tyrant” who allegedly wasted company funds on personal expenses and was supposedly “outright cruel” to colleagues. Project Veritas later sued O’Keefe for alleged financial impropriety, and the District Attorney in Westchester, New York has opened an investigation into him, the Nation reported this week.
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.
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“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.
Project Veritas did not return a request for comment, nor did Giles or attorneys representing the company in its lawsuit against O’Keefe. A spokesperson for O’Keefe did not return requests for comment.
Project Veritas terminated five employees on Monday and 20 on Thursday, according to two former employees who were laid off. “We went from 43 to 18,” one of those former employees told The Daily Beast.
On Friday morning, the Nation reported that O’Keefe was under investigation by the Westchester District Attorney’s office. The report prompted speculation that Project Veritas had laid off staffers in relation to a criminal probe. But a spokesperson for the District Attorney told The Daily Beast that the investigation (its subject matter currently unknown) has been ongoing since at least this spring, when the Nation initially contacted the District Attorney for confirmation of the probe.
Project Veritas’ layoffs took place in person and via Microsoft Teams video conference, and were conducted by a human resources officer without Giles present, the former employees said.
After O’Keefe’s ouster, Giles had been a promising candidate to return Project Veritas to conservatives’ favor. She co-starred in a 2009 sting video O’Keefe produced against the group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). In the video, Giles posed as a sex worker and O’Keefe as a pimp soliciting money. The clip catapulted O’Keefe to conservative stardom.
“When everything looked bleak [after O’Keefe’s departure this year], people were convinced to stay due to the promise of a new leader like Hannah Giles,” one recent Project Veritas employee said.
The optimism soon soured. Two recent Project Veritas employees accused Giles and her inner circle of being inefficient fundraisers, and of sending employees to chase impossible tips on stories whose subjects never materialized.
The former employees also cited a recent “ask me anything” meeting with Giles, in which she allegedly dodged staffers’ questions, at one point suggesting they call her husband to field inquiries during the meeting.
The differences extended to editorial decisions, including Giles’ alleged emphasis on a document cache that colleagues believed to be little more than a nothingburger. Recent employees claimed Giles had represented the documents as containing proof that China was manufacturing a bioweapon.
“The whole company was like, ‘what the fuck are you talking about, Hannah? Show us where there’s a bioweapon.’ And she just kept dancing around it, deflecting,” a former employee said. “It’s complete horseshit.”
The mass layoffs came to light Thursday evening via Project Veritas’s official Twitter account, which posted that “SOS Hannah Giles just fired us all.” The tweet was swiftly deleted.
“Normally when you get laid off at Project Veritas, your equipment is taken and you’re escorted off the property,” a former staffer said. “But when they fire 20 people at the same time—it’s just dumb on their part.”
