James O’Keefe, a far-right provocateur who could probably be reasonably lumped with media figures like Alex Jones, has gone on what is reportedly a weeks-long stint away from his role with his media organization Project Veritas as his future there is in jeopardy amid what apparently are serious concerns about his handling of the company.
What Project Veritas does involves filmed confrontations, either openly documented or more surreptitiously recorded, with figures in various institutions within media and culture. One recent example was a minutes-long video the organization released in which O’Keefe basically chases a reporter with The New York Times through what seem like random suburban streets evidently in close proximity to where that reporter, Adam Goldman, lived. Goldman questioned in the footage whether O’Keefe was stalking him. (The answer didn’t seem quite clear; O’Keefe was mostly just nagging him, which didn’t leave much time for an actually substantive conversation.) O’Keefe’s stint of leave is reportedly paid and was identified as a few weeks in length to employees at Project Veritas by Daniel Strack, the executive director.
The board is contemplating O’Keefe’s future with the company, which in theory could take either a lower profile or see him leaving altogether, and a meeting was evidently set for Friday. O’Keefe himself has been largely mum on the situation, in which the board at a company he founded could shrink his impact. To New York Magazine, he refused to comment on the substance of the situation and subsequently ignored their messages.
Some of the actions O’Keefe has taken in line with his current level of control at Project Veritas reportedly have already been undone, including what were evidently multiple firings, per sources who spoke to that magazine. Barry Hinckley, one of the execs temporarily booted by O’Keefe, told staff at Project Veritas he “stood up to a bully” before his temporarily forced departure, presumably referring to O’Keefe, and other accounts of the workplace depict the conservative commentator in a similarly unflattering perspective.
It’s obviously not that difficult to imagine that a guy who would chase a reporter and yell in an oddly childish tone that the target of his ire was a “Fed-boy,” dragging out the last syllable for effect, isn’t that great of a manager. One of the problems, though, is that Project Veritas is now running on a budget of tens of millions of dollars a year. The other exec who O’Keefe targeted actually happened to be its chief financial officer.
Elsewhere in the ecosystem of conservative media, a lawyer whose roster of clients has included Sean Hannity is now also representing Donald Trump in litigation from writer E. Jean Carroll over a sexual assault she says the ex-president perpetrated against her in the 1990s, and Fox itself, where Hannity is a host, continues hurtling towards trial in a massive defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, an elections technology company falsely maligned as involved in imaginary election fraud. Figures like Sidney Powell helped perpetrate the nonsense in broadcasts on Fox.
Image: Gage Skidmore/ Creative Commons
