Let’s be clear: Project Veritas is no charity. It’s a right-wing smear operation, and not a particularly competent one. Exhibit A in that regard is O’Keefe’s exorbitant compensation.

The nugget about O’Keefe’s 2021 payout was buried in a New York Times article about the $20,512 in “excess benefits” to O’Keefe reported in an IRS filing. Apparently, O’Keefe got Project Veritas to shell out $20,512 for “Project Veritas staff helping film behind the scenes and staff who were on site to accommodate James,” in his starring role in Oklahoma, performed at a farm in Virginia, according to Project Veritas’ executive director.

In fact, that’s a paltry sum compared to the big bucks O’Keefe seems to be costing Project Veritas. From The Times:

Between 2014 and 2021, Project Veritas’s revenue grew to $20.7 million, from $2.4 million, tax filings show.

But the latest filing shows that, in 2021, the group’s expenses also grew rapidly, to $20.6 million.

Mr. O’Keefe’s compensation fell slightly, to $405,000. But there was a significant increase in the group’s legal fees, to $4.7 million.

Those legal fees include fallout from the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary. The Times notes that O’Keefe’s home was searched by the FBI as a result and he has hired “two high-profile defense lawyers” to represent him in the matter. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that those legal fees are not coming out of O’Keefe’s pocket.

More from The Times:

In August, Project Veritas was ordered to pay Stanford University about $150,000 in legal fees after a federal judge tossed a defamation lawsuit a group filed in 2021. And the following month, a D.C. jury found that the conservative group violated wiretapping laws and fraudulently misrepresented itself to a Democratic consulting firm. Project Veritas was ordered to pay $120,000 but has appealed the decision.

Project Veritas also has an ongoing defamation suit against The New York Times.

There’s also a defamation suit by a postmaster in Pennsylvania against Project Veritas.

And that’s just the recent spate of bungling. In August, 2020, The New Republic wrote about O'Keefe:

When mainstream Americans think about James O’Keefe, if they think about James O’Keefe at all, it’s usually in reference to his most hilarious failures: ruining his own sting on George Soros’s Open Society Foundation by leaving a self-incriminating voicemail; failing to lure a CNN reporter onto his yacht for a detailed “faux seducing” prank; revealing his unseemly ties to the billionaire mercenary Erik Prince by posting his own vanity spy training photos on social media.

If Project Veritas thinks O’Keefe is worth $405,000 a year (or more), then excuse me while I dart off to sell them a bridge in Brooklyn at half price, available for a short time only.