The True Story of the Implosion of Project Veritas, Part 2: How Hannah Giles Finished It Off
An inside view into what really happened
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In Part 1 of this series, I told you the true story of what happened with Project Veritas and James O’Keefe. Not the one you heard on conservative media - that was James’s smear campaign. I told you the real story of how James egregiously misspent donor money, jeopardizing the organization’s non-profit status. When the board tried to rectify the situation, James elected to leave and do everything in his power to burn the organization down on the way out the door as revenge.
But what happened next was even more bizarre.
In this piece, I’ll take you inside Project Veritas as they brought Hannah Giles on as CEO, and how she managed to take an already bad situation and make it worse.
As with part 1, this article has been informed by speaking to over two dozen current and former Project Veritas employees at all levels of the organization, and you’ll see receipts here that you will not see anywhere else.
After James O’Keefe left, there was cautious optimism among the team at Project Veritas. James’s toxic behavior in the office had been untenable for many of them, and there was a relief and a weight off their shoulders with him gone. Even though the staff was being harassed relentlessly on social media due to the smear campaign by conservative influencers, they tried to keep their heads down and focus on doing their job. They continued releasing stories, including ones exposing Pfizer that contradicted James’s narrative that the drug company bought and paid for them.
The people who claim that Project Veritas was bought and paid for by Pfizer ignore that fact.
When I asked the employees I was speaking to at the time if they were going to make it, the answer was, “we may have to tighten our belts for a while, but we’ll be ok.”
Hannah Giles Joins as CEO
On June 8, 2023, Project Veritas announced that Hannah Giles would be replacing James O’Keefe as CEO.
There was a beautiful symmetry to this - contrary to what conservative media has told you, Hannah was the person who originally planned the ACORN sting that launched her and James into the public eye. James later took credit for it, but the reality is that it was Hannah who brought James into her plan and not the other way around.
During the negotiations to bring Hannah on, she swore to the team that she was bringing her own donor network to the table.
However, once she was actually on staff, those donors failed to show up. Hannah made excuse, after excuse, after excuse.
The first excuse was that she had been brought on as CEO for a 90-day trial period. She said that her donors wouldn’t commit if she weren’t made the permanent CEO.
So, the board made her the permanent CEO and made her a member of the board.
Still, no donors.
Then, she said the donors wouldn’t donate unless Matt Tyrmand left.
Matt Tyrmand was blamed publicly for leading the alleged coup against James O’Keefe. Behind the scenes, everyone knew that was garbage because there was no coup - it was James who made the choice to leave.
Still, Hannah claimed that her big donors wouldn’t come to the table unless Matt was removed.
So, Matt Tyrmand left. He resigned when Hannah was made a member of the board because he knew she wanted him out, and she had the votes on the board to do it. Even today, he continues to help and support the now ex-employees of Project Veritas, even though he is under no obligation to do so.
The big bad wolf Tyrmand was out. But still, Hannah’s donors didn’t show up.
Then, she said donors wouldn’t donate unless the company got out of the lease they had committed to on a new office building in Connecticut. They got out of the lease for pennies on the dollar.
Still, no donors. The person who got them out of the $6 million lease was among those the organization fired.
After that, the excuse was that the donors wanted specific employees that no one has ever heard of fired because they were “against Hannah.” Those employees happened to be the same ones who were most vocally asking questions about what was going on. So, Hannah fired them in the first round of layoffs before firing the rest of the people who were let go just days later.
It was excuse after excuse after excuse for why she couldn’t bring money into the organization. Even though she would tell people every day that she had “great calls with donors”, she would never given a straight answer regarding how much money they would be giving.
There was one large donation during that time, for $500,000, but that came from Project Veritas’s existing donor list.
Hannah Loses the Trust of the Staff
The lack of donations was not the only problem. Hannah failed to develop a relationship with the team at Project Veritas.
In July, Hannah forced them to release the China documents “story.” I put story in quotes because no one on the staff really considered it to be a story and they had been against releasing it.
The reason they didn’t consider it a story was that all of the documents they had were publicly available and the staff didn’t like that Hannah was asking the public to do their journalism for them by helping them to go through the documents.
However, Hannah insisted it be released so that they could use it to raise money.
It didn’t work.
She also lied to the staff at Project Veritas claiming that Brietbart and the Epoch Times had entire teams of people going through the documents. None of that was true.
At the same time, Hannah brought on her friend Ben Wetmore to advise her.
Ben Wetmore is also friends with James O’Keefe.
The staff never trusted Ben, and Ben did nothing to earn it. The week of July 31st, Hannah sent Ben to Project Veritas’s New York headquarters. He set up shop in James O’Keefe chair…and didn’t leave the office the entire week. He didn’t talk to the staff, didn’t go to meetings, didn’t even go to the kitchen - he just sat in James's chair all week.
Hannah never explained to the staff who Ben Wetmore was or why he was there, and all of a sudden, Ben has taken over the previous CEO’s office.
The following week, Hannah held an Ask Me Anything town all in front of the whole staff, and one of the questions was, “Who the hell is Ben Wetmore?”
Hannah answered that she couldn’t bring in donors because the team doesn’t treat them right. She refused to tell them who her donors were, which (for all his faults) is not something that James O’Keefe would have done. According to one source, the Chief Development Officer wasn’t even given access to the top donor lists by Hannah until weeks before the layoffs.
Hannah even directed the staff to call her husband and ask him questions (more on her husband later in this story). The youngest journalist on staff stood up and said “You’re the CEO. We’re not going to call your husband.”
Hannah Hires Her Friend To Do PR
The general consensus at Project Veritas was that they needed a proactive PR campaign in order to counter James’s smear campaign. However, Hannah refused to do interviews or release information to present their side of the story.
The Comms Team had lined up interviews with Hannah, including calling in some favors to get her an interview with Rolling Stone, only to have Hannah cancel the interview for no apparent reason.
So everyone - especially the Chief Financial Officer Tom O’Hara - was surprised when Hannah decided to hire her friend AJ Rice for $4,000 a month to do public relations for the organization to rebuild its reputation. No one could quite figure out what AJ was going to do for $4,000/month when the organization was trying to cut costs and save money.
When Tom questioned this, Board President Joe Barton told him to “cut the damn check.”
Project Veritas Abandoned Their Journalists
Christian Hartsock was the longest-standing employee at Project Veritas, their chief investigative reporter. He is responsible for many of the stories you’ve seen the company break over the years.
After James left, Christian was unanimously appointed to the Board of Directors as a staff ombudsman, with his role being to represent the interests of the staff. He would attend monthly board meetings on their behalf.
But at the beginning of August 2023, Board President Joe Barton suddenly started holding “special board meetings” that Christain was excluded from.
Christian heard about one of their meetings from Tom O’Hara and stormed into Hannah’s office to find out when he had been excluded. There, he found Board President Joe Barton sitting with his feet up, staring out the window.
He asked Joe what was going on with the board meeting.
Joe replied “It’s a special board meeting. For special purposes.”
Christian demanded to be sent the invitation.
Joe told him that he didn’t need to be there.
Christian asserted that he represented the staff and they should be represented.
Joe replied that the matter being discussed at the board meeting didn’t concern the staff and that Christian had no business there.
The next day, Christian asked Tom what the meeting was about.
Tom told him it was about removing indemnification from journalists.
After that happened, Joe scheduled another “special” board meeting. Again, Christian demanded to be included. Here is their text exchange:
The board later voted to removed the legal protection from journalists, including those who were being prosecuted for reporting on Ashley Biden’s diary.
This was after Hannah had released the video of how Project Veritas had obtained Ashley Biden’s diary against the wishes of the journalists who were involved to use it as a fundraising ask.
Hannah was later confronted for this by a the now-former director of field ops for Project Veritas. You can watch the video of that interaction here.
Christian Hartsock was let go in the second round of layoffs. He was the longest-serving employee at Project Veritas, had recruited Hannah as CEO, had vouched for her, brokered negotiations between her and the board, and defended Hannah until the very end.
After Hannah decided to let Christian go, she lied to the board members about why she did it. She told one that he got another job offer and agreed to leave for the sake of the company. She told another that she had gotten rid of him because he had engaged in PDA with another employee that he’s in a relationship with.
According to Christian, both of those claims are false. He continues to speak out about his experiences with Hannah today.
The Rest of the Layoffs
After the board voted to remove legal protection for the journalists, Hannah never told the staff about it. Immediately after it happened (and a few days after Hannah’s internal Ask Me Anything in which she told the staff to call her husband with their questions), there was another all hands staff meeting.
Hannah came into the meeting and declared “I had a a whole list of things to talk about but I don’t remember anything. What do you want to talk about?”
The organization is in crisis. The staff doesn’t trust their leader. And Hannah is withholding critical information about the board removing legal protections from the journalists who are putting themselves on the line to expose corruption.
Right after the meeting, Hannah flew home to Austin…and that’s when the staff found out the board had removed protections. Hannah was supposed to announce it in the all hands meeting, but what too afraid to do so.
The following Monday, August 14, 2023, the layoffs began. This is how the staff was notified:
On Tuesday, there was a leadership team meeting. Hannah assures everyone that if there was a mass layoff, everyone will have ample time and notification.
On Thursday, the journalists were finally notified that the board had voted to withdraw their legal protections.
And then, an hour and a half later, the mass firings happened. They happened over zoom. Hannah didn’t bother to attend the meeting. The HR Director fired 20 employees over zoom with no notice and no severance. At least one of those employees had been told just 24 hours prior that he wouldn’t be laid off.
The above list is not a full list of people who were laid off. One journalist not listed was even laid off while he was on medical leave, which is illegal. This is HR 101: You cannot fire people while they are on medical leave and are required to give them their job back (or something comparable) when they return. Doing otherwise is considered retaliatory for taking leave in the first place.
Team members who were fired still had access to the social media accounts and posted about the layoffs:
The general consensus of the staff was a complete lack of surprise. “This is how it ends,” with a laugh.
As I’ve previously reported, there was also internal blowback in the staff group chats.
There was no rhyme or reason to how the layoffs were made because Hannah didn’t consult with anyone else on the decisions, not even the organization’s Chief Financial Officer, Tom O’Hara.
Tom resigned later that night.
However, at least one of the people laid off seems to have been retaliatory instead of having anything to do with a financial or budget decision.
Did Hannah Retailiate For A Story on Her Friend?
Here’s another odd thing about the layoffs: It seems as though Hannah personally targeted the lowest-paid journalist and one of the most project journalists on staff because she had done a story on a friend of hers two years ago.
Alyssa Dehen (she was called Penny Lane in the layoff announcement on Monday) had been a contractor at Project Veritas for years. In 2021, Project Veritas published this story on GOP Candidate in Arizona, Alex Stovall:
Alex Stovall is a personal friend of Hannah Giles.
Alyssa was the journalist who got that story when she was a contractor. Since, she had joined Project Veritas as a full-time employee and was the lowest paid of all the journalists on staff. Even so, she was also one of the most productive journalists, having delivered half a dozen stories in the past two years, including one just one month prior to the layoffs.
Alyssa was let go in the first round of layoffs on Monday. She was the only journalist let go that day. She was the lowest paid.
And to top it all off, Hannah had told another journalist at Project Veritas that the reason Alyssa was fired were personal. I’ve heard this from multiple sources.
Remember when I told you that Hannah directed the Project Veritas staff to her husband (a non-Project Veritas employee) with questions?
Hannah’s husband, Joe Basel, also reached out to me directly after I released this story:
When I asked Hannah’s husband if Alyssa’s firing had anything to do with Alex Stovall, here was his response.
But how could Hannah have fired Alyssa a “long time ago” when Hannah had only been in a position to do so as CEO for a few months? Joe’s answer made no sense.
I kept pushing Joe…and he kept dodging the question:
Let’s talk about that last message.
First, according to multiple Project Veritas employees, James had been excited about the Alex Stovall story. They had produced it quickly because James wanted it out as soon as possible. So, this idea that James shared Hannah’s concerns is an outright lie.
Additionally, multiple employees also heard from Hannah directly that she was friends with Alex Stovall and that one of the things she wanted to do was retract the story off of their website and release a statement denouncing it. This is the statement she sent to the board:
This statement contradicts the idea that James “agreed and shared concerns,” as Joe Basel asserted above.
When I asked Joe about this, he denied the statement came from Hannah.
Recollections may vary.
Regardless, Joe Basel never answered why the lowest-paid and one of the top-producing journalists at Project Veritas was fired in the first round of layoffs if it had been a purely financial decision.
When I pushed him on this one last time, Joe claimed that some employees at Project Veritas offered to come back on a volunteer basis:
But the thing is that didn’t happen either. When I asked Joe who had volunteered, he couldn’t name anyone.
According to the employees I spoke with, even though some of them had offered to volunteer, the organization didn’t take them up on it. This is a text from the HR person telling an employee who offered that they were not in a position to accept their volunteer help yet.
Hannah Attempts To Drive The Narrative
After the layoffs took place, there was a trickle of articles that had obviously been placed by people still inside Project Veritas to attempt to do PR spin. This article appeared in The Gateway Pundit with the byline “Assistant Editor.”
Many from Project Veritas believe that the person who wrote it was Hannah and James O’Keefe’s friend Ben Wetmore, because he writes for the Gateway Pundit, and was designed to lay the groundwork to bring James back into the organization.
The theory is this: Hannah Giles will advance the narrative that she took on the role of CEO to get all of the coup masterminds out of the organization before handing the company right back over to James. This passage in the article seems to back up that position:
Board President Joe Barton and Me
Remember Joe Barton, the Board President who lied to the staff ombudsman about special board meetings he didn’t want him at?
This isn’t the only strange thing that Joe Barton has done.
Back in June, when I first started covering the story on my YouTube channel, I started receiving text messages from an anonymous person inside Project Veritas. It was clear to me they were involved, but they didn’t really give me any information I didn’t already have and so I wasn’t too worried about uncovering their identity.
Here is the full conversation I had with this anonymous person back in June:
He hinted around at a New Hampshire connection but, at the time of these texts, I didn’t know who Joe Barton was. I didn’t find that out until later.
That was the last I heard from the anonymous account.
Fast forward to the week after the layoffs.
When I released internal communication showing what happened after team members were laid off, Joe Barton started publicly replying saying I was lying but providing no evidence to the contrary.
And at the same time, Joe Barton revealed that he was the person who had been texting me anonymously ever since I started covering the Project Veritas story.
In between the initial reporting and the layoffs, someone told me that Joe lived in New Hampshire. So when Joe sent me another message from his anonymous burner number showing me a photo of his Free State Project passport I knew who it was.
He texted me to fish for information about my source, assuming it was Matt Tyrmand.
Keep this in mind for one moment, because things are about to get really weird.
The recording I’m referring to above is this one. I had replied to Joe’s tweets with it publicly:
Joe claims this video was made long before the layoffs.
In reality, it was made three weeks prior to the layoffs. It was not long proceeded.
I responded to Joe asking him these questions.
And instead of responding to me publicly, Joe texted me from the anonymous number…and then pretended it wasn’t him. But notice the timestamp, around 2:30am in the morning. He was texting me from his anonymous account at the same time as he was replying to me from an account in his name on Twitter.
Who is Really in Charge of Project Veritas?
I share the information about my conversations with Joe Basel and Joe Barton to ask the following question: Who is really in charge at Project Veritas?
Is it Hannah Giles?
It is her non-Project Veritas employee husband Joe Basel?
Is it James O’Keefe’s friend Ben Wetmore?
Is it Board President Joe Barton?
It’s all very confusing.
An ongoing question is regarding Hannah’s motivations. Why did she accept the role of CEO (and the $240,000 salary that came with it) if she didn’t intend to lead the organization?
After talking to over two dozen people who lived the experience, my conclusion is this: Never ascribe to malice what you can ascribe to stupidity.
Epilogue: After The Layoffs
A staff still remains at Project Veritas, but my personal guess is that things won’t last more than a few more months. We are seeing the final days of an organization that broke some of the biggest stories in history because James O’Keefe’s smear campaign was successful and Hannah Giles failed to counter it.
The company is closing down its New York headquarters and will be completely virtual form now on.
They only have a few journalists left on staff, and no one on the production team.
They have a little more than $1 million in their bank account.
Hannah recently sent out a fundraising email asserting that there were 60 journalists on staff at Project Veritas.
That was a flat-out lie. There were never 60 journalists.
And just the other day, it was announced that fundraising may not make a bit of difference because two more board members have resigned, leaving no oversight of the organization and Hannah without access to the organization’s bank accounts.
“This is how it ends”
Questions?
Let me know in the comments!
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Great work!
Does Giles have any previous experience running professional organizations? It doesn't seem like it.
I agree on the stupidity/incompetence vs. malice question.