By Dan Murphy
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe is not one of the most popular journalists in Westchester County, yet the company’s office is located here in Mamaroneck. Veritas’ lastest “gothca” video was with a Pfizer executive talking about things he shouldn’t be talking about, like how the company is trying to stay ahead of the next pandemic by experimenting with mutations of COVID.
Whether you agree or not with Veritas’ tactics, you should be able to separate that opinion from the facts that eminate from the hidden video conversations the group has been able to collect and post to the public.
The Veritas-Pfizer video got 41 Million views, but was not covered by many media outlets. That warranted to me a discussion with O’Keefe, if he would agree to a brief phone interview. Instead, I was invited to meet with O’Keefe in his Mamaroneck office last Tuesday.
The day before our meeting, a Veritas employee called and cancelled the meeting. The next day O’Keefe was suspended from the company he founded.
The reason why he was “forced to take a few weeks off?” Cruel behavior towards employees, who accused him of being “publicly humiliated” by him.
In a memo to the Veritas Board of Directors, a majority of employees signed a letter James has become a “power drunk tyrant,” and detailed a number of strange events, none of which warrant the removal of the name and face of the non-profit.
Steve Jobs and his demanding oversight over Apple employees comes to mind.
So why is this happening? Several posts on social media claim that it is a hostile takeover by the Board of Directors. “Apparently, what happened is that two executives in the company – Tom O’Hara and Barry Hinckley – were fired by James a week ago for insubordination. We don’t know what the insubordination was…but they did come back in less than a week to rally the board through a six-hour struggle session and then place James O’Keefe on leave. After James was forced out of the company, the two executives got the board to reinstate their jobs,” writes Karlyn Borysenko on Substack, https://karlyn.substack.com/p/what-we-can-learn-from-james-okeefe.
Borysenko also wonders if O’Keefe’s forced exit has anything to do with the Pfizer videos, and correctly points out that there is no video evidence of O’Keefe berating employees. One episode mentioned in the employee letter was that O’Keefe grabbed a sandwich from a pregnant employee. –Really?
O’Keefe will likely land on his feet somewhere. But who will lead Veritas for the Board of Directors?
