An attorney for Project Veritas believes recent FBI raids are part of a “political witch hunt” to uncover hidden government sources and conservative benefactors. Last month, FBI agents searched various sites linked to Project Veritas, including founder James O’Keefe’s home, as part of a probe into the disappearance of a journal belonging to Ashley Biden, President Joe Biden’s youngest daughter.
The Washington Examiner reports, Project Veritas’ lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon, recently told Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson that the Justice Department knew Project Veritas did not have the journal before the search.
She stated, “This is an absolutely breathtaking situation where the United States Department of Justice — supposedly because of this diary, but I’ll tell you why I don’t think it’s about the diary — has ignored the First Amendment, which protects the rights of the journalists and the press and of course also donors.”
Dhillon explained, the DOJ “is also ignoring a federal statute, the Privacy Act, that protects journalists and confidentiality. It is also ignoring DOJ guidelines passed as recently as this summer by the current attorney general, Merrick Garland, designed to protect journalists from precisely this type of raid.
So how are they getting around that?
They are claiming that Project Veritas in court filings are not, in fact, journalists, and that’s one of their reasons.” Additionally, Dhillon emphasized that the National File, not Project Veritas, published the journal. However, The National File claims to have gotten a digital copy from a Project Veritas “whistleblower” before publishing its contents online.
Dhillon also told Carlson she believed the DOJ was “really after Project Veritas’s telephones with contacts of lawyers and legal communications. Contacts of many, many sources in the Biden administration which is riddled with corruption.” During the search, FBI agents reportedly took two of O’Keefe’s iPhones.
Paul Calli, another attorney for O’Keefe, told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that Project Veritas paid anonymous tipsters for the “right to publish the material” in the diary more than a year before the raid but that Veritas never published it because they were unable to independently verify its authenticity and subsequently gave it to law enforcement.
The New York Times has reported that Ashley Biden’s lawyers have not verified whether the journal is hers. Yet, they have accused Project Veritas of threatening them in an “extortionate effort to secure an interview” with their client in the last few days of the 2020 campaign. Federal prosecutors are investigating whether the journal was stolen and published as part of a criminal plot.
