James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released a video on Tuesday afternoon purporting to show footage from a predawn FBI raid on one of its journalists in November, ostensibly in pursuit of information about a missing diary belonging to Ashley Biden.
The video, described at Project Veritas’s website and posted to YouTube as well, seems to show FBI agents pounding on a door, demanding to see someone’s hands raised, and rifling through personal belongings as they executed a search warrant.
In commentary on the footage, O’Keefe says: “The government’s invasion of our First Amendment rights should send shivers down the spine of every journalist in the country.” He claims that federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York appear to have targeted Project Veritas because of the diary, belonging to President Joe Biden’s daughter, which he says the outlet obtained legally from a source, but then turned in to law enforcement without publishing any of its contents.
After the FBI raided O’Keefe’s home, private and confidential memoranda from his lawyers were published by the New York Times, suggesting the possibility that the FBI leaked the documents to the paper. O’Keefe is currently suing the paper for defamation in state court, and he succeeded in persuading a state judge to stop the Times from publishing O’Keefe’s legal memos, and to return them to him. He also persuaded a federal judge to order a “special master” to review evidence on his personal cell phone, which the FBI seized in the raid, since material on the phone could prejudice the defamation case.
Several media and civil liberties organizations belatedly defended O’Keefe’s First Amendment rights after the FBI raid.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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