President Biden weaponized the Department of Justice against Journalists like Project Veritas.

Two weeks before the 2020 presidential election reporters from Project Veritas asked then-candidate Joe Biden to comment on allegations that he had sexually molested his daughter. The reporters were in possession of a diary written by Ashley Biden while she was in a drug rehabilitation program that included entries describing how she and her cousin were molested as children and detailing how her father forced her to shower with him.1 The reporters were also aware of nude photographs of underage members of the Biden family found on his son’s laptop that lent credibility to the claims Ashley made in her diary.2 Enraged and believing he was being blackmailed Biden refused their interview request and called on his political allies in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York to open an investigation. What started as vengeance or retribution against Project Veritas has turned into a war on the free press in America.

The federal investigation into Ashley Biden’s diary began on October 27th, 2020, and continues to this day making it one of the longest-running investigations in the history of the United States Department of Justice - even longer than Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into allegations that President Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election. The Department of Justice has deployed the full force of the federal government to investigate the communications of a nonprofit news organization called Project Veritas dating back as far as January 1st, 2020. More than a dozen FBI agents, ten U.S. attorneys, and half a dozen judges have issued dozens of secret orders, warrants, and subpoenas to Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Uber - forcing these companies to provide the government access to years worth of email, calls, texts, and files from current and former Project Veritas employees without notifying the targets of the investigation.

Using these secret orders the federal government was able to spy on Project Veritas for a year - reading every email, text, and document sent or received by reporters either currently or previously employed by the nonprofit news organization. When the news organization was alerted to the investigation almost a year later in October 2021 the government conducted pre-dawn raids on the homes of current and former employees of Project Veritas seizing more than 30 phones, laptops, and storage devices. The news organization’s lawyer sought and obtained an order from the court preventing the government from reviewing information on the devices until it could be reviewed by a special master to prevent prosecutors from seeing confidential or unrelated information. The government failed to reveal that it ALREADY had accessed and reviewed the information as a result of secret orders approved by half a dozen federal judges.

In fact, the government sought and obtained extensions from these other judges to ensure Project Veritas and Judge Torres wouldn’t discover their spying for at least another year. Fortunately, lawyers from Microsoft, aware of the efforts of Project Veritas’ lawyer to engage a special master, fought the government’s attempts to extend their gag order and were allowed to notify the company that the government had access to their email and data for more than a year.

Microsoft argued in a sealed motion draft3 that the government’s seven secret orders violated the First Amendment and infringed the company’s right to speak about issues of public concern and to inform its customers of matters involving their data privacy. When Microsoft’s lawyers realized the government was leaking the contents of the devices seized from the homes of the news organization, including attorney-client privileged information, to the New York Times they threatened the government with a lawsuit if it did not voluntarily allow them to notify Project Veritas of their spying - the government backed down.

It became clear to Project Veritas that the government had an inappropriate relationship with The New York Times when Mike Schmidt, a New York Times reporter, contacted the nonprofit news organization for comment moments after the November 4th and 6th raids were completed. Then Schmidt published email communications between Project Veritas and its lawyers provided by the government, the nonprofit news organization realized that the inappropriate relationship with The New York Times was almost certainly illegal.4

Complicating matters even more Project Veritas was in the middle of a defamation case against The New York Times. The FBI leaked emails between Project Veritas and its lawyers that related to their case against The New York Times.5 Shocked, a judge ordered The New York Times to stop writing about the leaked documents and to return all copies to the nonprofit.

The government spied on Project Veritas for more than a year and supplied the company’s competitor and legal opponent with information that might help their case. Ironically, the nonprofit news organization decided not to run the story about the diary because they weren’t certain that Ashley Biden’s claims against her father were true - President Biden doesn’t care he’s out for blood and the Department of Justice is perfectly willing to carry out his wishes.

Here is a timeline of events to help put Biden’s abuse of power in context over the course of 851 days: