New details flesh out how Project Veritas acquired Ashley Biden’s diary
A month before the 2020 election, Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, received a call from a man offering help. Striking a friendly tone, the man said he had found a diary that he believed belonged to her and he wanted to return it.
Biden had in fact kept a diary the previous year as she recovered from addiction and had stored it and some other belongings at a friend’s home in Florida where she had been living until a few months earlier. The diary’s highly personal contents, if publicly disclosed, could prove an embarrassment or a distraction to her father at a critical moment in the campaign.
She agreed with the caller to send someone to retrieve the diary the next day.
But Biden was not dealing with a good Samaritan.
The man on the other end of the phone worked for Project Veritas, a conservative group that had become a favorite of President Donald Trump, according to interviews with people familiar with the sequence of events. From a conference room at the group’s headquarters in Westchester County, New York, surrounded by other top members of the group, the caller was seeking to trick Biden into confirming the authenticity of the diary, which Project Veritas was about to purchase from two intermediaries for $40,000.
The caller did not identify himself as being affiliated with Project Veritas, according to accounts from two people with knowledge of the conversation. By the end of the call, several of the group’s operatives who had either listened in, heard recordings of the call or been told of it believed that Biden had said more than enough to confirm that it was hers.
The new details of Project Veritas’ effort to establish that the diary was Biden’s are elements of a still-emerging story about how Trump supporters and a group known for its undercover sting operations worked to expose personal information about the Biden family at a crucial stage of the 2020 campaign.
Drawn from interviews, court filings and other documents, the new information adds further texture to what is known about an episode that has led to a criminal investigation of Project Veritas by federal prosecutors who have suggested they have evidence that the group was complicit in stealing Biden’s property and in transporting stolen goods across state lines.
And by showing that Project Veritas employed deception rather than traditional journalistic techniques in the way it approached Biden — the caller identified himself with a fake name — the new accounts could further complicate the organization’s assertions in court filings that it should be treated as a publisher and granted First Amendment protections. Project Veritas regularly carries out undercover stings, surveillance operations and ambush interviews, mostly against liberal groups and journalists.
At the same time, new information about the case suggests that the effort to make the diary public reached deeper into Trump’s circle than previously known.
A month before the call to Biden, the diary had been passed around a Trump fundraiser in Florida at the home of a donor who helped steer the diary to Project Veritas and was later nominated by Trump to the National Cancer Advisory Board. Among those attending the event was Donald Trump Jr., although it is not clear if he examined it.
Federal prosecutors have been investigating how Project Veritas obtained the diary, and last fall carried out searches at the homes of three of the group’s operatives, including that of its founder, James O’Keefe. In court filings, prosecutors have suggested that the organization was complicit in the theft of some of Biden’s other belongings, which interviews show the group obtained as it was seeking to confirm the diary’s authenticity.
Project Veritas — which is suing The New York Times for defamation in an unrelated case — has denied any wrongdoing or knowledge that the belongings had been stolen. It has portrayed itself as a media organization that is being unfairly investigated for simply doing journalism and has assailed the Justice Department and FBI for their handling of the case.
Prosecutors have signaled that they view the circumstances very differently, all but dismissing in one court filing the group’s defense that it was acting as a news organization, saying that “there is no First Amendment protection for the theft and interstate transport of stolen property.”
In response to a request to Project Veritas for comment, O’Keefe sent an email criticizing the Times. “Imagine writing so thoroughly divergent from reality and so mendacious with innuendo that there is literally no utterance that won’t make it worse,” he said.
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