Project Veritas is an American far-right activistActivist
group founded by James O'Keefe in 2010. The group produced deceptively edited videos of its undercover operations, which use secret recordings in an effort to discredit mainstream media organizations and progressive groups. Project Veritas also used entrapment to generate bad publicity for its targets, and propagated disinformation and conspiracy theories in its videos and operations.
Project Veritas's targets included Planned Parenthood, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), NPR, CNN, and The Washington Post. In 2009, Project Veritas associates published misleading videos that depicted ACORN employees providing advice on concealing illegal activity, causing ACORN to shut down after losing funding; the attorney general of California cleared ACORN of wrongdoing in 2010, and the associates paid a total of $150,000 in settlements to an ACORN employee who sued for defamation. NPR CEO Vivian Schiller resigned in 2013 after Project Veritas released a deceptively edited video portraying another NPR executive making controversial comments about the Tea Party movement and NPR's federal funding. Project Veritas unsuccessfully attempted to mislead The Washington Post into publishing false information about the Roy Moore sexual misconduct allegations in 2017; the Post won a Pulitzer Prize after uncovering the operation. In 2022, a jury awarded $120,000 against Project Veritas for fraudulent misrepresentation of the nonprofit Democracy Partners.
As a non-governmental organization, Project Veritas was financed by conservative fund Donors Trust (which provided over $6.6million from 2011 to 2019) and other supporters, including the Donald J. Trump Foundation. In 2020, The New York Times published an exposé detailing Project Veritas's use of spies recruited by Erik Prince to infiltrate "Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda". The Times piece notes O'Keefe's and Prince's close links to the Trump administration, and details contributions such as a $1million transfer of funds from an undisclosed source to support their work. The findings were based in part on discovery documents in a case brought by the American Federation of Teachers, Michigan, which had been infiltrated by Project Veritas.
The organization's board fired O'Keefe in February 2023 for what it said was financial malfeasance with donor money. In September 2023, Project Veritas suspended all operations after laying off most of its employees. In December of the same year, Hannah Giles, who succeeded O'Keefe as CEO of the organization, resigned.
History
Project Veritas was founded in June 2010 by James O'Keefe, who served as chairman until he separated from the organization in February 2023 amid controversy over his handling of finances and his management style.
During the 2016 United States presidential election, the organization falsely claimed to have shown that Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign accepted illegal donations from foreign sources. Two Project Veritas members were sued for defamation by an employee of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) who was wrongfully depicted as a "willing participant in an underage sex-trafficking scheme". The suit resulted in two settlements: O'Keefe issued a statement of regret and paid the ACORN employee $100,000 in 2013; the other Project Veritas member paid the employee an additional $50,000 in 2012.
In 2017, Project Veritas was caught in a failed attempt to trick The Washington Post into posting a fabricated story about the sexual misconduct allegations against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. Rather than uncritically publish a story that accused Moore of impregnating a teenager, the Post critically examined the story, checked the source, assessed her credibility, and found that her claims had no merit, and that instead Project Veritas was trying to dupe The Washington Post.
O'Keefe has been barred from fundraising for Project Veritas in Florida, Maine, Mississippi, Utah, and Wisconsin, partly because of his federal criminal record for entering a federal building under fraudulent pretenses and partly because Project Veritas has repeatedly failed to properly disclose his criminal convictions in applications for nonprofit status. Similar disclosure issues for the group's registration also exist in New Mexico, New York, and North Carolina.
On February 11, 2021, Project Veritas's Twitter account was "permanently suspended for repeated violations of Twitter's private information policy." At the same time, O'Keefe's personal account was temporarily locked for violating the policy pending the deletion of a tweet. Twitter permanently suspended O'Keefe's personal account on April 15 for violating its policy on "platform manipulation and spam", which prohibits the use of fake accounts to "artificially amplify or disrupt conversations". O'Keefe denied that he used fake accounts on Twitter and said he intended to sue Twitter in response. In November 2022, following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, Project Veritas's account was restored along with a number of other high-profile far-right accounts.
In September 2021, Project Veritas's headquarters in Marmaroneck, New York, was destroyed by Hurricane Ida. Later that month, the organization announced that it had been scammed out of in what appeared to be a business email compromise attack. Attackers monitoring O'Keefe's email communications with his attorneys succeeded in interjecting an email from a similar-looking account into a conversation about an invoice payment, and the organization transferred funds to an account operated by the scammers.
O'Keefe was removed from his leadership position at Project Veritas on February 20, 2023, amid allegations of financial malfeasance and poor management of staff. The board charged that O'Keefe had used funds for a variety of personal expenses, including $14,000 for a charter flight related to fixing his boat and $150,000 for "black cars". The staff concerns were communicated to the board in a memo calling O'Keefe a "power-drunk tyrant". According to an unreleased internal audit, O'Keefe also directed Project Veritas employees to book a $12,000 helicopter flight from New York to Southwest Harbor, spent $208,980 on black car travel and $2,500 on DJ equipment and was abusive towards Project Veritas employees. O'Keefe also allegedly spent donor money on a romantic relationship with Alexandra Rose, a California real estate agent and star of the Netflix reality series Selling the OC.
Project Veritas subsequently sued O'Keefe and two others, alleging that they had created a competing organization, O'Keefe Media Group, while still employees, approaching PV's donors and using company funds for this purpose. O'Keefe was also alleged to have improperly spent company funds on himself.
In 2023, after six employees sued Project Veritas for underpayment, it settled for $270,000. At the same time, Project Veritas settled a former employee's sexual harassment suit alleging a "highly sexualized" workplace with "rampant" drug use.
In September 2023, Project Veritas suspended all operations after laying off most of its employees.
Hannah Giles, who had been appointed CEO to replace O'Keefe in June 2023, resigned in December that same year. Upon resigning, she wrote, "I stepped into an unsalvageable messone wrought with strong evidence of past illegality and past financial improprieties." She added, "Once such evidence was discovered, I brought the information to the appropriate law enforcement agencies."
Methods Project Veritas uses deceptive techniques, including recording people without their knowledge and misrepresenting their employees' identities and purposes. It hires former U.S. and British military and intelligence agents to train its employees, who are often called "agents" or "operatives" in internal documents. Internal memos show that Project Veritas clears these activities with its legal team to stay within the boundaries of the law, which The New York Times says is a sign of its interest in "using tactics that test the boundaries of legality and are outside of mainstream reporting techniques". Rolling Stone called Project Veritas's reporting practices "dubious", with their reporters actively manipulating their targets.
Deceptive video recordings
Project Veritas was founded in June 2010, but O'Keefe produced two series of deceptive videos before founding it:
Planned Parenthood recordings (2006–2008) In 2006, O'Keefe met Lila Rose, the founder of an anti-abortion group on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus. They secretly recorded encounters in Planned Parenthood clinics in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, in which Rose posed as a 15-year-old girl impregnated by a 23-year-old man. Rose and O'Keefe made two videos incorporating heavily edited versions of the recordings and released them on YouTube. The video omitted the parts of the conversation in which a Planned Parenthood employee asked Rose to consult her mother about the pregnancy and another employee told her, "We have to follow the laws." Rose took down those videos after Planned Parenthood sent her a cease and desist letter in May 2007 asserting that the videos violated California's voice recording laws, which require consent from all recorded parties, but they continued to make more clandestine videos.
ACORN videos (2009)
The organization produced deceptively edited videos targeting the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a 40-year-old advocacy organization for low- and moderate-income people.
In September 2009, O'Keefe and his associate Hannah Giles published edited hidden-camera recordings in which Giles posed as a prostitute and O'Keefe as her boyfriend, a law student, in an attempt to elicit damaging responses from ACORN employees. ACORN mostly registered people from Latino and African American communities.
The videos were recorded during the summer of 2009According to the California Attorney General's investigation report, p. 8, the recordings occurred in ACORN offices in eight cities: Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, Miami, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Bernardino. and appeared to show low-level ACORN employees in six cities advising Giles and O'Keefe on how to avoid detection by authorities of tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution. He framed the undercover recordings with a preface of him dressed in a "pimp" outfit, which he also wore in TV media interviews. This gave viewers, including the media, the impression that he had dressed that way when speaking to ACORN workers, but he actually entered the ACORN offices in conservative street clothes (the sleeve of his dress shirt is visible on camera). Furthermore, the ACORN employees involved reported his activities to the San Diego Police Department after he left. O'Keefe selectively edited and manipulated his recordings of ACORN employees and distorted the chronologies.Public Sociology , Philip Nyden, Leslie Hossfeld, Gwendolyn Nyden. Sage Publications, 2011 Several journalists and media outlets expressed regret for failing to properly scrutinize and vet his work.
Reception and lawsuit