Schadenfreude and Private Inurement, Courtesy of James O’Keefe and Project Veritas.

It is irrational, I know, to resent personal injury attorneys or TMZ/Drudge Report style investigative reporters. They have their place and eventually they serve useful ends, even if only infrequently.  Without personal injury attorneys, cigarette and legal heroin pushers (pain clinics and their respectable counterparts, I mean) would live even more comfortably than they do. And those are just the easy cases.  Cars would be a helluva lot more dangerous too.  All kinds of stuff would just blow up in our faces and the Ford Pinto industry would just keep making and selling them.  And one of my favorite movies is “All The President’s Men” in which “WoodStein” exemplified investigative reporting at its finest, and maybe even to the salvation of our Democracy.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, 1973

But I am feeling irrational today so I admit to experiencing the warm glow of schadenfreude from the turmoil surrounding  Project Veritas.  That’s the nonprofit that likes to use questionable tactics to ambush public officials to say something stupid, off the cuff, or out of context in order to advance a usually right wing point.  Everything has its uses, I suppose, but the sort of “dialogue” Project Veritas wants to stimulate is more “gotcha” sound bite than anything else.   Anyway, PV’s founder has apparently been cancelled, losing out in a power struggle over hiring and firing decisions according to a WAPO article:

Board members moved earlier this month to suspend its, founder, James O’Keefe because of concerns related to the organization’s bylaws and, by extension, its good standing with the IRS. It stated that O’Keefe’s attempt to fire the group’s chief financial officer, Tom O’Hara, was in violation of Project Veritas bylaws, which spell out that, “Any officer elected or appointed by the Board of Directors may be removed by the Board of Directors with or without cause.

O’Keefe’s suspension morphed into a termination for cause a few days later.  And then the two sides started exchanging public statements, like two divorcing spouses trading accusations in court.  In PVs, statement it pointed to all sorts of private inurement and excess benefit transactions adding to the justifications for firing O’Keefe.  

Here are a few examples of what has been uncovered so far by PV Leadership (this is far from an exhaustive list, it is merely a small representative sample): 

-$14,000 on a charter flight to meet someone to fix his boat under the guise of meeting with a donor
-$60,000 in losses by putting together dance events such as Project Veritas Experience
-Over $150,000 in Black Cars in the last 18 months 
-Thousands of dollars spent on DJ and other equipment for personal use 
-Hundreds of other acts of personal inurement

Ok, but where were you board members while these “hundreds of acts of inurement” were going on?  Too busy spying on women at their OB/GYN appointment or chasing down dangerous woke activists, I bet.  Yes, this is a nonprofit, but the Board might want to consult Caremark, not to mention IRC 4958(a)(2) before it starts airing all this dirty laundry in justification of itself. 

Schadenfreude is such a good feeling, let’s just be honest.

darryll jones