Dick Armey’s decision to part ways with Tea Party’s FreedomWorks created quite the buzz on Wednesday. Departing with an $8 million parachute, Armey claimed that he was leaving due to an internal split over the group’s future. “My differences with FreedomWorks are a matter of principle,” he told the Associated Press.
Now, days later, more details are emerging about reasons that led to his departure.
“We had serious differences of opinion about the process of how you do business, and I wanted to move on,” Armey told The Daily Caller in the most recent report.
“There’s unethical behavior going on at the top and there are a bunch of people leaving,” an anonymous source told The Daily Caller.
Cover of Kibbe's book "Hostile Takeover." Could this be the ‘principle’ Armey was talking about?
According to The Daily Caller report, multiple sources lay the blame on the shoulders of FreedomWorks CEO and president Matt Kibbe, who came out with a new book new book, “Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government’s Stranglehold on America,” in June of this year.
It seems that the feeling among the FreedomWorks staff is that the organization has become a promotional vehicle for Kibbe.
Kibbe insists that that is not the case and denies that other members of the organization were leaving because of “this dispute over the direction of FreedomWorks.”
And for now, Kibbe and Armey are sticking to the same story regarding Armey’s decision to leave.
“[The book] had virtually nothing to do with it,” Kibbe told The Daily Caller. “I think there were just two very different visions about where FreedomWorks was headed.”
