A judge in New York ordered The New York Times to stop publishing information from internal memos taken from Project Veritas, a conservative investigative group under investigation by the FBI, in a move that has stirred conversations about press freedom and privacy rights.
Earlier this month, The New York Times published parts of sensitive conversations between Project Veritas operatives and their lawyers — which the group said should be protected under attorney-client privilege.
The documents surfaced in the paper’s reporting just days after federal authorities raided the home of James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, as well as the homes of two of his associates. Authorities took devices on which O’Keefe said were sensitive journalistic material, calling the seizures a violation of his First Amendment rights.
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Project Veritas this week succeeded in persuading the court to temporarily stop the publication of information from the legal memos by linking them to another case in which the group and The New York Times are fighting in court.
After The New York Times ran a pair of stories critical of a Project Veritas investigation last year, lawyers for the group sued the paper for defamation in the New York Supreme Court.
The group secured a victory in March when a judge allowed the case to proceed, overruling the New York Times’s efforts to get the lawsuit dismissed.
But The New York Times filed in May to pause the discovery process in the defamation lawsuit, a stay which the judge ultimately granted. That stopped Project Veritas from being able to obtain documents from the paper that could have bolstered its case and also prevented The New York Times from doing the same to the group.
The judge’s decision this week to ask The New York Times to justify its reporting on the legal memos, as well as to stop writing stories about them until it does so, was based on a complex argument from Project Veritas lawyers in the defamation case — not the investigation that led to the seizure of O’Keefe’s records.
Project Veritas attorneys argued The New York Times had violated the stay of discovery order by obtaining documents related to the defamation lawsuit outside of the legal process.
Libby Locke, a lawyer in the defamation case, said in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner that the memos at the heart of this week’s ruling were “directly related” to the lawsuit New York Times attorneys are fighting.
“The New York Times sought and obtained, over Veritas’ objection, a stay of discovery,” Locke said. “Notwithstanding that stay order, the Times improperly solicited, obtained, and disseminated the attorney-client privileged communications of its litigation adversary written by counsel of record in the litigation.”
“And the content of those privileged materials is directly related to the substance of the defamation litigation — an admission the Times has tacitly made by referencing the litigation in its article about Veritas’s attorney-client communications,” Locke added.
Separately, lawyers representing Project Veritas in the federal investigation have questioned the timing of the paper’s reporting on documents that were likely contained on the devices federal officials took from O’Keefe’s home days earlier.
That investigation centers on the diary of Ashley Biden, President Joe Biden’s daughter.
O’Keefe has acknowledged the group obtained Ashley Biden’s diary last year but said that, after a careful review, he made the decision not to publish any of its contents. O’Keefe has also said he handed the diary over to law enforcement last year.
However, sensitive excerpts from the diary surfaced on a right-wing website days before the 2020 election. The website that published the excerpts claimed to have received them from a whistleblower at a media organization who was frustrated with the decision not to publish the material.
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Press freedom advocates and The New York Times itself slammed the judge’s decision to pause reporting on the Project Veritas documents, describing it as an example of prior restraint or the suppression of journalism for legal reasons.
O’Keefe’s case has drawn national attention due to the aggressive nature of the investigative steps taken in the Ashley Biden diary probe, as well as his group’s notoriety. Project Veritas is known for using tactics such as using secret recordings in its reporting, which has earned it scorn from much of the legacy media and political world.
