2 years ago
A group that has singled out journalists and Democrats in undercover operations contends that prosecutors misled a federal court and sought unwarranted gag orders during a federal investigation of the group’s ties to the alleged theft of a diary belonging to President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley.
In November, the FBI conducted predawn raids at the home of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and the homes of two other individuals who worked with the group. The agents acted with warrants that allowed them to seize phones and computers to search for evidence of trafficking in interstate property.
The raids generated controversy in some circles because Project Veritas identifies itself as a news organization and the use of search warrants against journalists and news outlets is extremely rare due to Justice Department policies and a federal law passed in 1980 to limit such investigative steps.
After the raids, U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres agreed to a request by the group to put in place a special master to review the information on the seized devices to ensure that prosecutors did not get access to emails, text messages and other records that might be subject to attorney-client privilege or other legal protections.
However, in a letter Tuesday to a federal judge overseeing aspects of the probe, Project Veritas’ attorneys said they recently learned that that for nearly a year before last November’s raids prosecutors used gag orders to keep quiet other steps taken in the diary probe, including grand jury subpoenas and court-ordered seizures of all of the emails of O’Keefe and several colleagues kept in particular accounts over a three-month span in 2020.
Prosecutors obtained warrants to seize all emails from an account belonging to one unnamed person the group’s lawyers called a “Project Veritas journalist” during a period spanning more than a year from 2020 to 2021, the letter says.
In some or all of the cases, prosecutors obtained non-disclosure orders — often called gag orders — prohibiting disclosure of the fact of the searches to the users of the accounts. The letter to Torres complains that even as lawyers for Project Veritas and prosecutors were laying out their respective views about a special master to address the information seized in the November FBI raids, prosecutors had similar and perhaps identical information from the group from the earlier warrants, did not reveal that fact and continued to renew the gag orders related to those searches.
“The government’s failure to disclosure its other privilege invasions makes a mockery of these proceedings,” Project Veritas attorney Paul Calli and other counsel wrote in a 12-page letter to Torres Tuesday.
Calli complained that the special master review Torres put in place was effectively circumvented because the prosecution had access to the group’s records by other means.
“The government already had in place mechanisms for circumventing these protective processes and invading Project Veritas’s First Amendment and attorney-client privileges, the existence of which the prosecutors concealed from counsel for Project Veritas and its journalists and, we believe, from the Court,” he wrote.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, which is overseeing the investigation, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Most of the email searches appear to have been directed to Microsoft, although prosecutors also sought records from Uber about individuals working with the group, Calli said.
Calli specifically objected to prosecutors’ renewing gag orders about the email searches after the group and the public were aware of the investigation into how the group obtained the alleged Ashley Biden diary in 2020. O’Keefe has denied that the group stole the document, but according to the New York Times, prosecutors are probing whether people working with Project Veritas asked others to obtain other of Ashley Biden’s effects as the group sought to confirm whether the diary was authentic.
O’Keefe has said his group was told that the diary and other materials were abandoned by the president’s daughter when she moved out of a home she stayed in temporarily in Florida.
The group’s letter to Torres says that prosecutors got year-long renewals of non-disclosure orders to Microsoft in January 2022, more than a month after Torres put in place the special master mechanism.
Calli said the secrecy violated the First Amendment and hamstrung Project Veritas’ efforts to protect its rights.
“It is impossible for us to understand how the government convinced multiple Magistrate Judges to extend non-disclosure orders for an investigation that was already public and widely-reported,” he wrote. “Project Veritas had the right to know of these government infringements….The government’s clandestine invasions of journalist’s [sic] communications corrode the rule of law.”
Project Veritas’ claims to protections accorded to the press while using subterfuge to target journalists have divided First Amendment advocates. Projects Veritas makes these claims even as it continues to fight to impose a similar restraint on the New York Times.
In November, a New York state judge ordered the Times not to report on any attorney-client privileged materials the newspaper had acquired from Project Veritas. The Times appealed the restraint on its First Amendment rights, but struggled for months to get the courts to lift the unusual order. An appeals court judge lifted the order temporarily last month, but the issue remains in litigation.
Meanwhile, Project Veritas and the Times remain at odds. Earlier this month, the group released hidden-camera videos depicting Times journalist Matthew Rosenberg disparaging others at the newspaper. The Times countered Sunday with another article on the conservative group, alleging that just before the 2020 presidential election, it used a ruse to try to “trick” Ashley Biden into confirming that the diary was hers.
The latest Times report referred in passing the group’s litigation with the storied news outlet, but did not mention the group’s new sting videos aimed at stirring up dissension within the newspaper’s ranks.
POLITICO reported earlier this month that Times executive editor Dean Baquet told reporters in the paper’s Washington bureau that Project Veritas was “trying to make our heads explode.” Baquet previously called the group “awful” and “despicable,” according to the Washington Post.
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