(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Obama-appointed District Judge Beryl Howell has denied a motion to compel the FBI to search for communications with the New York Times about the raid of conservative journalist James O’Keefe’s home—ruling that the Project Veritas founder hasn’t proven that such records exist.
The issue stems from the FBI raiding O’Keefe’s home on Nov. 6, 2021, in relation to the supposed theft of Ashley Biden’s diary, which describes inappropriate sexual behavior by her father, President Joe Biden.
Within an hour of the raid, O’Keefe said he received a text message about the matter from a New York Times reporter. And within days, NYT published an article based on confidential records, including attorney-client communications, seized from O’Keefe’s home.
O’Keefe and others have surmised that the FBI leaked his records to NYT. And in April 2022, transparency group Judicial Watch sued the Justice Department on O’Keefe’s behalf for communications between the FBI and NYT.
But on Nov. 27, Judge Howell denied Judicial Watch’s motion to force the FBI to scour its offices for records of the communications.
Howell said that neither O’Keefe nor Judicial Watch have proven that the FBI leaked his records to NYT. Implausibly, the judge said that the records may have come from O’Keefe’s lawyers.
“Plaintiff’s premise that the FBI was the source for the NYT’s reporting ignores the more obvious, cited sources for the reported information, including a neighbor at the location targeted in the warrant, the founder of Project Veritas and lawyers for Project Veritas, and even information potentially relayed in response to the NYT’s inquiries by the [Southern District of New York’s U.S. Attorneys Office],” the judge said.
In a video, O’Keefe explained why the judge’s theory is bogus: His neighbors were only quoted as seeing the FBI outside his door, and he only spoke to the newspaper about his colleagues being raided days earlier—but that was before he was raided.
“It doesn’t seem like the neighbors would know the secret grand jury and search warrant information,” he said.
Nevertheless, Judge Howell has declined to make the FBI even search its archive of text messages for evidence of communications with NYT. Howell said the FBI acted in “good faith” in searching a few email archives and communications of top FBI officials that had nothing to do with the Ashley Biden investigation.
“How is any of this undertaken in good faith? The attorney general expressly prohibits the seizure of reporters’ notes. All of this is in bad faith, and likely illegal and unconstitutional in every conceivable way,” O’Keefe said in response to the judge’s contention.
O’Keefe, who left Project Veritas this year and now runs O’Keefe Media Group, said the judge’s decision shows why his undercover journalism is so crucial.
“That’s why we do what we do,” he said.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
