(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) Project Veritas claimed in a letter to a federal judge that Justice Department prosecutors secretly accessed the group’s emails and then used gag orders to hide the illegal spying, Politico reported.
Last November, the FBI raided the homes of James O’Keefe, the group’s founder, and two other employees, stealing computers and phones in an effort to concoct an interstate trafficking charge against the journalists.
The FBI received a search warrant on the pretext that Project Veritas had stolen Ashley Biden’s diary, which contained compromising information about her father, President Joe Biden, and her brother, Hunter Biden.
After the raid, District Court Judge Analisa Torres, an Obama nominee, granted Project Veritas a special master who would review and redact information on the stolen devices to ensure that the Justice Department did not illegally access certain records.
But Project Veritas’s attorneys revealed in a letter to Torres that the Justice Department had accessed O’Keefe and other employees’ records a year prior to the raid through secret grand jury subpoenas and court orders.
“We have discovered that from November 2020 to April 2021, the government used compulsory demands, including secret warrants and orders, to obtain voluminous
materials from Microsoft, the email services provider used by Project Veritas, spanning the email accounts of eight journalists and Project Veritas’s Human Resources Manager,” the attorneys wrote.
Their discovery renders useless the special master, assigned to preserve attorney-client privilege and other legal protections, because the Justice Department had full access to the emails before the raid.
“The government’s failure to disclosure its other privilege invasions makes a mockery of these proceedings,” Project Veritas attorney Paul Calli and other counsel wrote in the letter.
“The government already had in place mechanisms for circumventing these protective processes and invading Project Veritas’s First Amendment and attorney-client privileges, the existence of which the prosecutors concealed from counsel for Project Veritas and its journalists and, we believe, from the Court,” he wrote.
