Project Veritas Lawyer Alleges DOJ, FBI Might Have Leaked Confidential Info to NYT

The investigative group faced a series of FBI raids as part of an investigation into the disappearance of the diary of the US president's daughter, Ashley Biden.

The Department of Justice or the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) may have leaked confidential information to The New York Times about the raids against Project Veritas journalists and their legal communications, the attorney for the investigative group's chief, Harmeet Dhillon, has stated.

"We have a disturbing situation of the US Attorney's Office or the FBI tipping off The New York Times to each of the raids on Project Veritas' current and former employees. We know that because minutes after these raids occurred they got calls from The New York Times which was the only journalism outlet that knew about it".

The attorney, however, admitted that Project Veritas can't say with absolute certainty how the NYT obtained information on the raids and the legal memos of the journalists, recently published in a "hit piece". She noted that regardless of how the newspaper obtained this information it did so in an "illegal and unethical" manner.

The New York Times published excerpts from legal advice that Project Veritas' lawyer gave to its journalists, who are known for engaging in secret filming and faking their identities with the goal of obtaining unique information for their bombshell reports. They namely reported on the alleged influence of employee bias on Google and CNN's operations, as well as other questionable practices in private companies.

The newspaper that published the legal memos was among the targets of Project Veritas in 2017. The journalistic group published several undercover pieces of footage of the newspaper's employees in 2017. In addition, the two went to court after the NYT accused Project Veritas of running a "coordinated disinformation campaign" by publishing reports on alleged illegal ballot-harvesting by Democrat lawmaker Ilhan Omar's campaign in 2020.

However, the group's latest legal woes are oddly related to things they did not publish. In 2020, the media outlet was contacted by unidentified "tippers", who handed them a copy of the alleged diary of Ashley Biden – daughter of the then-Democratic presidential candidate. The notebook was purportedly stolen from a room in which she had stayed, but Project Veritas could not verify the authenticity of the diary and decided not to publish it.

Regardless of their decision, the excerpts from the diary were released by another media outlet, but Project Veritas ended up in the FBI's crosshairs, with the law enforcement agency raiding the homes of current and former employees, including the group's founder James O'Keefe. He called the raids an "attack on the First Amendment" and urged all journalists to harshly condemn it.