Project Veritas’ Chairman given “well-deserved PTO” as company scrambles to survive In light of Pfizer, Biden and other lies.
James O’Keefe, chairman of Project Veritas, is being considered for removal as the conservative organization is facing reports of outright cruelty toward employees, money mismanagement, lawsuits from former employees, leaks about its internal workings, spreading harmful information in misleading Pfizer report and a federal investigation into its conduct in purchasing a diary stolen from Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter.
An internal message sent to Project Veritas employees by the organization’s executive director, Daniel Strack, said that O’Keefe would be taking “a few weeks of well-deserved PTO.”
Project Veritas is a conservative organization known for using deceptive tactics to obtain secretly recorded videos that they edit in misleading ways and then publish. (Politifact)
According to NY Mag, Project Veritas has continued to promote the organization’s latest stings, including a series of hidden-camera videos that captured a Pfizer scientist discussing what Project Veritas described as dangerous gain-of-function research related to COVID vaccines. (“Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research,” the pharmaceutical company responded in a statement after the videos appeared.) One video in the series culminated with a physical altercation between O’Keefe and the Pfizer employee.
“Pfizer just got caught doing gain of function to mutate covid intentionally for vaccines.” According to one commentator on a social Media post who got 92,000 “likes”(see Politifact link for the post and more) which rates the Project Veritas claim “false.”
From Politifact:
- Gain-of-function research is work that’s reasonably expected to make a pathogen more virulent or transmissible.
- Pfizer denied doing gain-of-function research while developing its COVID-19 vaccine, and an expert told PolitiFact he agreed with Pfizer’s assessment.
- A conservative group known for using deceptive tactics released video footage that sparked these claims about Pfizer’s research. The video purported to show an employee saying that Pfizer had considered doing research that would potentially mutate the virus that causes COVID-19 in order to preemptively develop vaccines.
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In another video, posted in late January, O’Keefe accosted an investigative reporter for the New York Times, Adam Goldman, whose byline has appeared on multiple stories about the Biden-diary case. “Look how scared he is,” O’Keefe says in the videos, as Goldman holds up an iPhone to record their interaction.
In a bizarre turn, O’Keefe, who performed in high-school musicals, has added a series of musical productions to the group’s repertoire, including an elaborate “Project Veritas” experience that involves O’Keefe dancing while wearing a bulletproof vest.
In December, Project Veritas acknowledged improperly giving O’Keefe $20,500 in “excess benefits” to pay for Project Veritas staff to accompany him to Virginia as he performed a lead role in a jproduction of the musical Oklahoma!. The Daily Beast
O’Keefe has an over dozen year track record of dubious reporting practices, and his resume of issuing few retractions is nothing to be proud of: ethical journalists correct their mistakes, O’Keefe doubles down. Veritas reporters have been known to not simply ask questions, but instead actively manipulate and pressure their targets into the reactions, sometimes by going on multiple dates with their chosen targets, sometimes by relentlessly badgering them, sometimes by targeting customer-service workers trained to mollify even the most aggressive and unpleasant customers or risk losing their jobs.
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone Daily Beast NYMag and Politifact PressHerald-background on Ashley Biden