OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Attorneys for the Project Vertitas founder believe that the Department of Justice has been tipping off the New York Times about raids on current and former employees.
The company has been scrutinized regarding the theft of a diary purported to belong to President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden, that the company never published, The Daily Mail reported.
The FBI conducted raids at O’Keefe’s New York home and those of others connected to Project Veritas early Saturday morning, seizing two of O’Keefe’s cell phones, among other items.
Days later, on Thursday, the New York Times published a report based on memos from the group’s lawyer, revealing his legal advice on the group’s use of false identities and undercover filming, tactics that are eschewed by most modern journalists.
Later that day, a federal judge ordered the DOJ to stop extracting data from the phones, grating a request from O’Keefe’s legal team made the day before for an independent party to be appointed to oversee the review of the confiscated devices.
O’Keefe’s attorney Harmeet Dhillon in an interview on Thursday night slammed the Times’ report as a ‘hit piece’ and questioned whether the DOJ had leaked the legal memos to the Times, an extraordinary and possibly illegal step.
“I can’t say how the New York Times got this information, but they got it in a way that is illegal and unethical,” she said on Fox News.
“We have a disturbing situation of the US Attorney’s office or the FBI tipping off the New York Times to each of the raids on Project Veritas current and former employees,” the attorney said.
“We know that because minutes after these raids occurred they got calls from the New York Times which was the only journalism outlet that knew about it. And they published this hit piece today, which is really despicable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this low from the New York Times before, to publish people’s private legal communications,” she said.
“This is a scandal of epic proportions. Every journalist who is not worried about this should hang up their journalism card, and all First Amendment lawyers as well,” she said.
The attorney gave credit to District Court Judge Analisa Torres for a Thursday decision that ordered the DOJ to stop taking data from O’Keefe’s phone.
“We are gratified that the Department of Justice has been ordered to stop extracting and reviewing confidential and privileged information obtained in their raids of our reporters, including legal, donor, and confidential source communications.
‘The First Amendment won a temporary victory today, but Project Veritas has a long way to go to hold the DOJ and FBI accountable for their actions,” she said.
She said that the federal government grabbing information pertaining to Project Veritas’ employees containing donor information, communications with attorneys and sources from within the Biden administration raise “multiple First Amendment issues.”
“We went to the court and asked the court to order a special master to review this information and not let the Southern District of New York prosecutors and the FBI look at it without somebody separating out this information,” she said to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“The government would not agree to do that voluntarily but we went to court and today a federal judge did order the government to stop looking at these phones. So ultimately, we’re going to get some answers as to what was reviewed and what they did with it,” the attorney said.
“The DOJ has specific regulations about this. There’s also a federal statute called the Privacy Protection Act that protects journalists and their information from exactly this type of thuggish behavior that the DOJ has done in this case,” she said.
“They have blown federal law, they blown the Constitution, they blown due process and civil rights and now they’re so easily communicating in some level for sure with the New York Times,” she said.
