Project Veritas accused the federal government in a court filing of conducting an “all-out assault on the First Amendment and free press” by allegedly “circumventing” a review process established by a federal judge for legally protected materials seized from the group, reports Lawandcrime.com The upshot, said attorneys for the organization, is that federal prosecutors may have afforded themselves backdoor-style access to exactly the sort of information a judge ruled should be filtered out from a high-profile federal probe. The filing involves a contested FBI raid on Project Veritas staffers that surrounded the organization’s receipt of the alleged diary of presidential daughter Ashley Biden.
“Because Project Veritas researched a potential news story about what Ashley Biden’s diary recounted about her father, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has launched a retributive campaign that does violence to the First Amendment,” wrote the group's attorneys. “As far as we know, federal law enforcement has never before investigated an abandoned diary,” the Project Veritas attorneys told U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres. “Moreover, the government’s diary investigation has included extreme measures that violate the First Amendment and corrode freedom of the press.” The Project Veritas filing comes just a few days after the New York Times recapped how the Trump-favored investigative organization came to possess the alleged Biden diary. The Times said the U.S. Department of Justice is examining whether Project Veritas played a role in “stealing Ms. Biden’s property and in transporting stolen goods across state lines.”