Often, when I am covering a topic I lack familiarity or specificity with, I bring in an outside source—in the case of nonprofits, that meant talking to sources like lawyers and financial experts on the challenges that can face charities. (Lawyers, it should be noted, often don’t speak in absolutes about specific situations when talking to media outlets.)
Jobst didn’t do that, essentially meaning he was interpreting the documentation himself.
Citation needed. I don't know that Karl consulted with a lawyer before making this video, but given that he's right in the middle of getting sued and has spent over $100k on legal fees defending himself in that lawsuit, it'd be pretty surprising if he didn't talk to his lawyer before making this video, but instead just sort of sprung it on him as a little surprise.
I'm curious what Ernie's reason is for asserting specifically that he didn't talk to a lawyer about his video.
I can take or leave Jobst’s claims of embezzlement—I think while Khalil probably spoke a bit too loosely during IndieLand, the format is a livestream and does lead to a lot of loose talk. Dude is filling time for hours, because that’s how the format works, and that lends itself to slip-ups. It doesn’t seem like he was being intentionally misleading, for the most part. But I do think that if Khalil decides to do another livestream like this in the future, he should probably cut out the middleman. It’s clear that what they were building towards struggled from an execution standpoint, and the use of a charity tied directly to Khalil has raised too many questions.
By saying that he'd donated money he hadn't donated, he was just... filling time on his stream? "For the most part?" Doesn't that aspect of the issue deserve a little more attention than this one dismissive paragraph?
(Edit: I expanded the quote to give full context. Contrast this against how Karl "not a bad journalist -- far from it" Jobst actually showed quite a few exact clips of Jirard saying the things he was referencing to support his arguments with specifics, instead of just making vague statements about "slip-ups.")
I have more I'd like to say about other things in this article, but honestly most of it is just beside the point. Like I said, the actual situation is actually extremely extremely simple. Seeing these huge videos or articles, which talk about charity fraud but spend almost all their runtime dealing at incredible length with issues other than "Did Jirard commit the technical definition of charity fraud?", actually specifically emphasizing that it wasn't a big deal if he did for the short time they touch on it, seems very weird.
(Edit: I could actually sympathize a lot more with the "Karl went too far" narrative before I spent so much time on things people are posting in this thread. It's definitely true that he's not a journalist and he makes money running a flashy Youtube channel; I could easily believe that he publicly attacked a couple of genuinely awful people like Billy Mitchell and it worked well, and he sort of got carried away looking for the next target, and then went too far in his Completionist video. I'd only ever really heard Karl's side of the story, and I didn't care about the topic enough to look into it any more. But these two attempts at defending what Jirard did are genuinely ridiculous.)
Fun fact, mostly unrelated but something in your message reminded me: I once played against a guy at a Go club, and we had an enjoyable game but he beat me. He wanted to talk to me about the game afterwards, and he started replaying the game for me from memory so he could make commentary. He replayed a pretty decent chunk of the beginning; I honestly don't remember but I think around the first 25-30 moves of the game.
I later learned he was the visiting Go person who was just stopping by the club for social reasons but could demolish anyone. He was incredibly kind and polite.
I think I got so mad that I spent half an hour of my life watching this, that I replied to myself. But my response (after watching most of the video) is up there.
Okay, I've seen enough; I made it to 33:12. This video is way longer than it needs to be; Karl made some pretty specific allegations, which do line up with the legal definition of charity fraud (which is laid out in clear legalese in the video), if they're true. The most critical part is the way Jirard repeatedly on stream made very specific statements about where the money was going to go, or had gone, that turned out not to be true by his own later admission. The video could have started at 28:29 with "what is fraud, and did it happen," and done at most a couple minutes' Cliffs Notes for the rest.
I waited and waited for this to be addressed.
At 31:02, he artfully excerpts a statement from Jobst saying the behavior was "unethical and almost certainly illegal," by saying only the "certainly illegal" part. Those are two very different statements, and this was the first time my whoa-hold-the-fuck-up meter started to register.
At 31:30, he airs one of the statements by Jirard that's not really an issue, and explains that as a general statement it's not really an issue. How about the statements Karl took issue with? I was back in waiting mode.
At 33:04, he says, "The times where Jirard has stated that funding has occurred might be obvious miscommunications or simple misstatements. Human error."
Shut the fuck up Mr. Lawyer Man. You can't make a whole half hour lead up about why the whole thing is a huge misunderstanding and what a great position Jirard is in since he never actually did any fraud, and then just casually drop that "Oh yeah and those the times he lied about where the money had gone he probably just made a mistake and it's not a big deal." Especially since part of the defense is, well we were waiting before we actually gave the money for it to be enough to be able to do X Y Z fancy thing.
I am not a lawyer. There may be some additional explanation that clarifies why they were "obvious miscommunications." But I saw enough to satisfy my curiosity.
There were no legal threats from Karl's side to get lost in. There were statements about Jirard's conduct, but no threats. I'm suddenly a lot more skeptical about what you're saying, although I'll still watch the video.
he only thing he actually proved was that approximately $600k sat in a bank account that most people probably believed was being moved along more judiciously than that
The assertion was that Jirard had confirmed that some of the money was spent on things that weren't charity, and that the explanations Jirard gave for why it hadn't been given to charity after years had passed were nonsense. All of that depends just on Jirard's statements.
That said, I can buy the idea that there were other allegations in the video that shouldn't have been made because they're not provable; I'll watch your video.
a trap allowing Jirard to legitimately counter-sue
Counter-sue? Karl is suing Jirard? When did this happen?
I asked about the specific claims in the story I linked to.
Claim #1 can be verified by watching Jirard's video
Claim #2 can be verified by watching Jirard's video
Claim #3 is a simple statement of logic, no factual assertion
Claim #4 is a statement of what's in Jirard's video, and an argument about how the law works, no factual assertion beyond what's in the video
Claim #5 is a simple statement of logic (predicated on what's in Jirard's video)
Claim #6 is an assertion about what Jirard claims "constantly"; hard to verify without watching literally everything Jirard has published
Literally nothing in the story I linked had anything to do with anything not in the public record. I was asking about those specific claims to get a sense of what exact statements of Karl's you're talking about. Your answer doesn't give me a ton of confidence that you're being precise in your allegations about Karl.
I haven't watched your video and don't plan to for a little while because of time reasons, but I'll take a look. I am curious on the topic (why I asked you the question I did.) The only other thing I'll say on the topic is, Karl's been on the receiving end of a $100k+ lawsuit already from the subject of one of his videos; it's possible that he's saying irresponsible things without consulting with his lawyer who would otherwise advise him not to, but I think it's unlikely.
What's the factual issue with what he said about Jirard? Like for example, would you say any of the big blockquotes in this story are specifically untrue?
Edit: Buried way down in the thread is my response after watching the video. TL;DR I stopped watching when after faffing around for 30 minutes, the guy finally got to the point, and almost immediately said with a straight face, "The times where Jirard has stated that funding has occurred might be obvious miscommunications or simple misstatements. Human error."
I want to normalize having a sarcastic commentator making scathingly aggressive Youtube videos about people in the news who are doing unethical things.
Battlefield 1942. Vehicle combat, area-control mechanics, "realistic" shooter gameplay (before that term became an obscene word), and class-based team mechanics had all been invented before, but the way it brought them together and the degree to which it polished them to arrive at something fun as hell was nothing less than revolutionary at the time. It was so groundbreaking that (for better or worse) it basically spawned the "AAA WW2 game" genre that then lasted for decades.
Then, the sequels were so consistently mediocre that the original was more or less erased from history.