James O’Keefe’s New York home was raided by FBI agents just 5 days ago on Saturday.
On Friday, the FBI conducted a raid of two New York addresses of people connected to Project Veritas as part of an investigation on how Ashley Biden’s diary was made public shortly before the 2020 election.
BREAKING: FBI Raids Project Veritas Over Ashley Biden’s Diary
Project Veritas Founder James O’Keefe’s home was also raided by FBI agents as part of this “investigation”.
BREAKING: FBI raids Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe’s New York home over Ashley Biden Diary https://t.co/B977sEuXSJ
— Drew Hernandez (@DrewHLive) November 6, 2021
The New York Times was likely notified of the raid by the Stasi FBI.
“The F.B.I. carried out search warrants in New York as part of a Justice Department investigation into how pages from Ashley Biden’s journal came to be published by a right-wing website,” New York Times reported.
An hour after the raid was conducted, The New York Times contacted one of the reporters to ask for comment on this confidential investigation.
The New York Times was the first to break the story. They even reached out for comment, after his home was raided at 6 a.m.
In October 2020, Ashley Biden contacted the feds and reported several items were stolen in a burglary, including her diary.
Project Veritas never published pages of Ashley Biden’s diary, however, another conservative site did.
O’Keefe: The FBI took materials of current, and former, Veritas journalists despite the fact that our legal team previously contacted the Department of Justice and voluntarily conveyed unassailable facts that demonstrate Project Veritas’ lack of involvement in criminal activity and/or criminal intent.
Like any reporter, we regularly deal with the receipt of source information and take steps to verify its authenticity, legality, and newsworthiness. Our efforts were the stuff of responsible, ethical, journalism and we are in no doubt that Project Veritas acted properly at each and every step
O’Keefe “put himself at great risk” when he released a statement on the investigation of PV journalists. The FBI raided his home the very next day.
Now tonight, five days after the FBI raided his home, The New York Times released a new report on James O’Keefe with several private documents from Project Veritas.
It took Chris Wray’s FBI less than a week to leak O’Keefe’s documents to their cohorts at the NY Times.
The New York Times released a breaking report on James O’Keefe and Project Veritas on Thursday night. They admit in their report that they received
Hours after F.B.I. agents searched the homes of two former Project Veritas operatives last week, James O’Keefe, the leader of the conservative group, took to YouTube to defend its work as “the stuff of responsible, ethical journalism.”
“We never break the law,” he said, railing against the F.B.I.’s investigation into members of his group for possible involvement in the reported theft of a diary kept by President Biden’s daughter, Ashley. “In fact, one of our ethical rules is to act as if there are 12 jurors on our shoulders all the time.”
Project Veritas has long occupied a gray area between investigative journalism and political spying, and internal documents obtained by The New York Times reveal the extent to which the group has worked with its lawyers to gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices can go before running afoul of federal laws.
The documents, a series of memos written by the group’s lawyer, detail ways for Project Veritas sting operations — which typically diverge from standard journalistic practice by employing people who mask their real identities or create fake ones to infiltrate target organizations — to avoid breaking federal statutes such as the law against lying to government officials.
The documents show, for example, Project Veritas operatives’ concern that an operation launched in 2018 to secretly record employees at the F.B.I., Justice Department and other agencies in the hope of exposing bias against President Donald J. Trump might violate the Espionage Act — the law passed at the height of World War I that has typically been used to prosecute spies.
“Because intent is relevant — and broadly defined — ensuring PV journalists’ intent is narrow and lawful would be paramount in any operation,” the group’s media lawyer, Benjamin Barr, wrote in response to questions from the group about using the dating app Tinder to have its operatives meet government employees, potentially including some with national security clearances.
In a separate July 2017 memorandum, Mr. Barr emailed a representative of the group that the criminal statute involving false statements to federal officials “continues to be an expansive, dangerous law that inhibits Veritas’s operations.”
The documents give new insight into the workings of the group at a time when it faces potential legal peril in the diary investigation — and has signaled that its defense will rely in part on casting itself as a journalistic organization protected by the First Amendment.
The F.B.I. last week searched the homes of Mr. O’Keefe and two former Project Veritas operatives — Eric Cochran and Spencer Meads — as part of the investigation into the reported theft of Ms. Biden’s diary. Mr. O’Keefe has acknowledged receiving a grand jury subpoena in the case.
…
Mr. O’Keefe said the F.B.I. took his phones, which had confidential donor and source information. He said that neither he nor his group had done anything wrong, and that the F.B.I. searches were an assault on the First Amendment.
The legal documents obtained by The Times were written several years ago, at a time when Project Veritas was remaking itself from a small operation running on a shoestring budget to a group more closely modeled on a small intelligence-gathering organization.
During the Trump administration, the group saw a flood of new donations from both private donors and conservative foundations, and hired former American and British intelligence and military operatives to train Project Veritas agents in spycraft.
In a statement issued by one of its lawyers, Project Veritas said it “stands behind these legal memos and is proud of the exhaustive work it does to ensure each of its journalism investigations complies with all applicable laws.”
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