Today is the one-year anniversary of Matt Tyrmand and his friend Dan Strack leading a 6-hour Maoist “struggle session”-style board meeting flogging me for taking SUVs to meetings, stealing pregnant lady’s sandwiches, and amongst other things, claiming I’m a bad leader. I have a recording of that meeting that I never released.
Matt Tyrmand said Project Veritas didn’t need James O’Keefe anymore and would be fine without him. That, along with his statement “You didn’t build that, your employees did” sounded right out of the Labor theory of value, one of the pillars of Marxism. He seemed to want the farm without the farmer or the golden eggs without the goose that produced them. This appears to be a common problem with nonprofits in general. Nobody owns anything; therefore, no good deed goes unpunished - if you have the wrong people involved.
My main concern in the board meeting one year ago tonight while I sat there quietly being flogged for hours, was indemnifying our journalists because I knew the organization would run out of money if they voted me out. That action would leave our journalists, who needed defending, hung out to dry. The ongoing lawsuits affected 1st and 4th Amendment principles, particularly unconstitutional FBI raids and accompanying search warrants. I never settle lawsuits on principle, because I refuse to bear false witness on the 1st amendment and choose the highly difficult, expensive route of dying on every 1st amendment hill. The only way I can do this is by making the final decisions related to raising and apportioning money to litigation. Our cases remain in the circuit courts with some inevitably bound for the Supreme Court. Since making these final decisions and having the backs of our journalists is central to the sanctity and integrity of the journalism itself, my journalism and being the CEO and final decision-maker are inextricably linked.
So, I had no choice but to ask the board to resign. They refused. They also refused to consider, or even fathom, the indemnification issue. The “struggle session” indicated they weren’t even interested in having a dialogue. They informed me I needed to take my lashings and feel remorseful. The entire board eventually resigned months later anyway, after they spent millions of dollars and were running out of money. It wasn’t until then that they started to confront the indemnification issue (you can ignore reality but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality), and began to send out emails asking their audience to pay the legal bills of those raided. Then, to the shock of the few remaining Project Veritas staff, leadership used what little money they raised off the fundraising emails, not to support legal defense, but to pay themselves. This irresponsible conduct was so unconscionable it led to the resignation of their own lawyer.
I then had the impossible task ahead of somehow raising funds to pay Project Veritas journalists’ legal bills after being fired, while starting a new venture (OMG - O’Keefe Media Group) from scratch and with absolutely no infrastructure. If that wasn’t impossible enough, Project Veritas - the company I founded, then sued me and asked a Federal Judge in New York to issue an injunction to stop me from working. Now things started to seem demonic.
All of this led most of Project Veritas’ donors and audience to believe the worst-case scenario - that people were compromised, pinched, or worse. While that is certainly possible, I don’t know that to be true. Although the timing did provide undeniable circumstantial evidence. What did Matt Tyrmand, Dan Strack, George Skakel, John Garvey and Joe Barton think people would were going to assume after taking such a drastic action of ‘indefinitely suspending” James O’Keefe only a week after the Pfizer story?
Donors and the audience were going to conclude that the Project Veritas Board was evil, stupid, or compromised.
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