February 21, 2023, 09:00 AM
chellim1VINCIT OMNIA VERITAS
Now that we've heard from both Project Veritas' board and from James O'Keefe, it's time to talk about the whole mess.
by Jeff Childers
Today, we have a special C&C edition: We need to talk about Project Veritas. We were promised answers by Monday, and boy, did we get them. James O’Keefe made an internal resignation video that leaked in about three seconds, and the Board published a wild, literally unbelievable response. Although there is a TON of other breaking news, we need to give this story our full attention for today.
I rounded up lots of thoughts plus some suggestions for current PV employees who must surely be wondering what to do next. Here’s a hint: do what you do best.
I was originally going to write this post in the form of a letter to James O’Keefe, part legal advice, part sympathy, part life wisdom. But as I re-watched his video and kept turning the whole thing around in my head, I realized James doesn’t need any advice from me.
What I saw in the video is a positive, confident, happy warrior who is executing a plan and running rings around his enemies.
James, who’s spent years wrangling with Deep State persecution, and who understands better than anyone how those toadstool-gobbling reptiles operate, realized that: Project Veritas has been compromised. /The calls are coming from inside the house./ So he planted charges, leapt aboard the Millennium Falcon, and is racing toward outer space at warp speed. Figuratively, of course.
From what I can tell, James is NOT just operating on instinct. I think he deliberately tested the theory of whether Project Veritas has been infiltrated, by asking the Project Veritas Board to resign. When every single traitorous one of them refused, James had his answer. It doesn’t MATTER whether it was Pfizer, the CIA, the FBI, Russia, Fauci, or even Putin himself. The company has been compromised.
And so James began carefully executing his plan.
(As an aside, the deep-state’s fingerprints are all over Project Veritas’ miniature color revolution. It’s their specialty! They can depose a Shah, an Ayatollah, a Prime Minister, or even a President. Deposing a non-profit CEO is child’s play, a mere trifle.)
Still, James O’Keefe is running rings around them. I suspect that, because of the explosive nature of the Pfizer video, the Deep State had to move a lot faster than it likes, and got a little sloppy.
I’ll explain the whole thing. But first., let’s agree we’ve now heard from both sides, and there’s enough evidence to start forming opinions.
Remember that I patiently gave the PV Board the benefit of the doubt, even back when things looked really bad? I did not leap to conclusions, or onto the hot-take bandwagon, or join team hyperbole. I waited for evidence. And now we have a lot of evidence.
To my mind, the most meaningful evidence is that the Board has been lying.
That’s right, I’m calling the Board a collective liar. I won’t name the person I spoke with at Project Veritas, because as far as I know she was just repeating what she was told. But I asked her directly and repeatedly: has there been ANY change to O’Keefe’s title, compensation, or employment status? She directly and repeatedly insisted: NO. No change of any kind, just a couple weeks of PTO.
The Board later said the same thing in a public statement: There were no employment status changes.
But they lied. James’ heartfelt resignation video, intended only for internal use, was leaked by whistleblowers and gives us a glimpse into the process’ details. James showed board minutes in the video that clearly reflect that his employment status either DID change (for the worse), or at minimum, the situation was much more nuanced and ambiguous than they were telling us.
So the board lied to me and to the public, violating the company’s core value of Truth — “Veritas” — and becoming what it claims to oppose. Project Veritas’ board failed the challenge when the rubber met the road.
James also described how the Board ambushed him with short notice of the meeting, and how it turned an “emergency meeting” into a seven-hour struggle session bringing in a raft of employees to criticize him.
If true, and I have no reason to think it wasn’t, it was bush league. Amateur hour.
Here’s James’ video. It’s 45 minutes long, and well worth the watch, but you don’t need to watch it now to keep up with the post.
Twitter avatar for @JamesOKeefeIII
James O'Keefe @JamesOKeefeIII
Since it’s already out there, here are my heartfelt remarks to my staff this morning.
I need to make clear I have not resigned from the company, Project Veritas, I founded 13 years ago. I was stripped of my position as CEO and Chairman.
I came to the PV …
https://t.co/X1lKCnwuif1:27 AM ∙ Feb 21, 2023
98,211Likes27,567Retweets
Next, let’s learn some legal issues everyone’s been dancing around, which will help you understand how it played out this way.
Over the past couple weeks, James and the PV Board have been engaged in an intricate legal dance that was immediately obvious to corporate lawyers like me. James, the CEO, and the Board members are all “officers” of the company. Officers owe significant duties to the company, duties of loyalty and honest dealing, called “fiduciary” duties.
The most common lawsuit against a corporate officer is for breach of their fiduciary duties. But the first thing they teach lawyers about this area of practice is a gigantic exception: you can’t sue corporate officers for making BAD decisions, no matter how moronic or self-destructive. There’s only a valid claim if the act was intentionally harmful or disloyal.
As an example of a clear breach of fiduciary duty, imagine a board member being bribed by a competitor to vote the company out of a lucrative market, or to dump a profitable product line.
Over the last couple weeks, both James and the Board have each been carefully calculating how they could do various things without getting sued for breaching their respective fiduciary duties. That’s the reason why we haven’t heard much from either side: the less talking there is, the less chance to say something that could be used by the other party in a lawsuit.
I believe the PV Board members know all this will destroy the company. I think they are PRETENDING like they are just making horrible decisions, so that they can defend a future lawsuit for breaching their fiduciary duties. For example, they’ll defend lying about James’ employment status by saying, maybe in hindsight it was a bad decision to lie, but at the time it seemed telling the truth would have hurt the company.
This next email to PV employees from a Board member, leaked last night, is a perfect example. This is supposed to look like damage control — but it’s not. This is a pathetic, barely-trying effort to SIMULATE damage control. If PV were REALLY trying to survive this disaster, the Board would be holding nonstop, in-person, all-hands town hall meetings right now.
If anything, this email will only make PV employees MORE anxious.
Read the email, and ask yourself if it looks like it was written by a board member of a $60M media company:
If this was legit, the board would NOT be sending one-sentence emails without any details or plans about how they’re going to handle the massive tsunami of bad PR racing toward the company RIGHT NOW. How about telling staff how much money is in the war chest to see this thing through? How about explaining what the public relations team is up to, or the social media group? How about reporting on how donors are responding to the breaking news and what’s being said to them?
How about reassuring employees that their jobs are safe?
That email is a fraud. It says nothing. It is an exhibit, the feverish work of a corrupted, dishonest, and lazy board member fraudulently pretending he is “doing something,” only for the purpose of manufacturing some evidence he can use later to defend himself in a future lawsuit. /Look, I tried to save the company, I sent an encouraging email!/
Dude, you did NOT try to save the company. You literally texted it in, and watched the company implode. Plus you are a horrible writer. Try using a period sometime. It’s a very useful punctuation, and it’s conveniently located on the keyboard, requiring only a trivial effort to stick them between your sentences.
Or maybe you were drunk, who knows.
Late yesterday, the Board escalating the conflict with another public statement, now adding to their previous complaints about James’ management style by tacking on brand-new financial mismanagement allegations. Their claims are ridiculous, but never EVER should have been put up on the firm’s website:
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com...ack&utm_medium=email