“These are personal attacks that are just garbage,” Light said. “They’re not even newsworthy. So we’re going to do everything that we can to stop them.”

Project Veritas paid a former employee named Izzy Santa a five-figure settlement after she threatened to sue. Santa’s settlement included a nondisclosure agreement, and she declined POLITICO’s interview requests. She and O’Keefe had a falling out after she tipped off one of his targets, Abbie Boudreau, about a lewd plan to embarrass her. Boudreau was working for CNN on a documentary about O’Keefe and other young conservative activists at the time.

Gonzalez, the Project Veritas board member, said he was “very disappointed” that Santa tipped off Boudreau instead of coming to him, and he suggested that Naffe was “trying to take advantage of James.”

O’Keefe, meanwhile, asserted that Templar and Adeleye — who he pointed out were “volunteers within Project Veritas” — were properly credited for their roles in the NPR sting. “At every opportunity I publicly gave the volunteers credit for their contributions to the project and their accomplishments,” he said in an email.

Without Templar and Adeleye, “there would be no NPR investigation,” Gonzalez conceded. “I don’t think it was James’ idea. I think it was their idea,” he said. He acknowledged that O’Keefe has sometimes overshadowed other activists and added “I don’t know if folks are craving attention or are jealous that James gets a lot of the attention.”

And while he said Project Veritas has implemented legal and strategic vetting procedures for stings and activists in order to avoid future clashes and embarrassments, Gonzalez predicted that O’Keefe could one day be a sting victim at the hands of a jilted associate or other enemy.

“It’s bound to happen,” he said. “I mean, he does it to people and people are going to do it to him, and we fully understand that.”

Yet despite O’Keefe’s efforts to cast himself as a political outsider, Project Veritas has also been trying to use his appeal to raise money from within the conservative movement, which shied away from him after the botched Landrieu caper and the aborted CNN prank.