Project Veritas is accusing prosecutors of misleading a federal court by using nondisclosure orders to conceal materials they have obtained through warrants against the group’s email service starting in 2020.
Last year, following FBI raids of the group’s associates, U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres ordered a special master to ensure that prosecutors do not use privileged information as evidence. But the group’s lawyers allege federal prosecutors are circumnavigating this process, thus putting Project Veritas’s rights in jeopardy, via orders that required certain searches to be kept secret.
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“The government already had in place mechanisms for circumventing these protective processes and invading the First Amendment and attorney-client privileges of Project Veritas and its journalists, the existence of which the government concealed from counsel for Project Veritas and its journalists and, we believe, from this Court,” the group’s lawyers wrote in a letter to Torres on Tuesday.
Torres, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is tasked with overseeing aspects of the government’s inquiry into how Project Veritas acquired first daughter Ashley Biden’s diary. The FBI raided the home of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and conducted similar raids on some of his associates last year while investigating whether the group committed theft when it obtained the diary.
Project Veritas’s letter to Torres attached warrant documents and gag orders that the Southern District of New York obtained before the raid took place. Prosecutors obtained “journalistic and attorney-client privileged materials” by issuing subpoenas against Microsoft to obtain emails from at least nine of their employees, Project Veritas’s lawyers said. Prosecutors then allegedly used the nondisclosure orders to muzzle Microsoft from disclosing its actions. Project Veritas used Microsoft as its email service.
The special master was appointed to protect privileged material but because of the nondisclosure orders, Project Veritas raised concerns that the prosecutors might be leading the court astray.
“It appears that the government misled this Court by omission, failing to disclose during the briefing and arguments over the appointment of a Special Master that the government had already obtained through these surreptitious actions many of the privileged communications this Court charged the Special Master with protecting. The government’s clandestine invasions of journalists’ communications corrode the rule of law,” the lawyers for Project Veritas wrote.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the U.S. Attorney General’s Office for the Southern District of New York for comment but did not receive a response.
Federal investigators began obtaining the warrants and nondisclosure orders more than a year before the FBI raids took place, but they received extensions for some of their orders after the raid took place. The most recent extension took place in January, one month after the special master was appointed.
Project Veritas is seeking preliminary relief from the court, including a court order to halt government access to materials obtained from Microsoft, information on whether prosecutors properly filtered out privileged material during their review of documents obtained from the warrants, information on the identities of prosecutors involved in the review, and disclosure about any other third-party groups to which the government issued similar warrants.
Most of the attached documents in the letter to Torres featured requests of Microsoft, but Project Veritas’s legal team noted that Uber has “also notified Project Veritas that it received some unspecified form of compulsory demand for records and a non-disclosure order.”
O’Keefe detailed the allegations in a video released Tuesday.
HUGE From Project Veritas
Latest video reveals DOJ spied on Journalists with sealed search warrants and non disclosure orders
Legal docs reveal how DOJ concealed possession of privileged communications from a federal judge#bidendiary pic.twitter.com/C9qCimSvJy
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) March 22, 2022
Project Veritas has insisted both in court and in public that it obtained Biden’s diary legally. A lawyer representing O’Keefe, Paul Calli, claimed the group acquired the diary after Biden abandoned it at a home in Delray Beach, Florida.
The group never published contents from the diary and has since turned it over to authorities, according to Politico. But lawyers for Biden, 40, have accused Project Veritas of threatening them as part of an “extortionate effort to secure an interview” with their client in the final days of the 2020 campaign, according to the New York Times. Alleged pages of Biden’s diary were published by a right-wing website, National File, which claims it obtained a digital copy from a Project Veritas “whistleblower.”
Project Veritas accused the Southern District of New York prosecutors of looking into the diary matter “with total disregard for the First Amendment and with the utmost hostility towards the free press.”
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The American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement Tuesday expressing deep concerns about Project Veritas’s allegations.
“We deplore Project Veritas’ deceptions, and we don’t have a full picture of the government’s investigation. But we’re concerned that the precedent set by this case could have serious consequences for press freedom. We’re deeply troubled by reports that the Department of Justice obtained secret electronic surveillance orders requiring sweeping disclosure of ‘all content’ of communications associated with Project Veritas email accounts, including attorney-client communications,” said Brian Hauss, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, in a statement.
