NEW: Ashley Biden's diary was passed around at a Trump fundraiser in early Sept. '20 at the home of a Trump donor who ultimately helped steer it to Project Veritas. The donor was nominated by Trump to an executive branch post in Dec. '20. w/@adamgoldmanNYT https://t.co/Yr73QgaRb1
— Michael S. Schmidt (@nytmike) March 20, 2022
A month before the 2020 election, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s daughter, Ashley, received a call from a man offering help. Striking a friendly tone, the man said that he had found a diary that he believed belonged to Ms. Biden and that he wanted to return it to her.
Ms. Biden had in fact kept a diary the previous year as she recovered from addiction and had stored it and some other belongings at a friend’s home in Florida where she had been living until a few months earlier. The diary’s highly personal contents, if publicly disclosed, could prove an embarrassment or a distraction to her father at a critical moment in the campaign…
The man on the other end of the phone worked for Project Veritas, a conservative group that had become a favorite of President Donald J. Trump, according to interviews with people familiar with the sequence of events. From a conference room at the group’s headquarters in Westchester County, N.Y., surrounded by other top members of the group, the caller was seeking to trick Ms. Biden into confirming the authenticity of the diary, which Project Veritas was about to purchase from two intermediaries for $40,000.
The caller did not identify himself as being affiliated with Project Veritas, according to accounts from two people with knowledge of the conversation. By the end of the call, several of the group’s operatives who had either listened in, heard recordings of the call or been told of it believed that Ms. Biden had said more than enough to confirm that it was hers…
Drawn from interviews, court filings and other documents, the new information adds further texture to what is known about an episode that has led to a criminal investigation of Project Veritas by federal prosecutors who have suggested they have evidence that the group was complicit in stealing Ms. Biden’s property and in transporting stolen goods across state lines.
And by showing that Project Veritas employed deception rather than traditional journalistic techniques in the way it approached Ms. Biden — the caller identified himself with a fake name — the new accounts could further complicate the organization’s assertions in court filings that it should be treated as a publisher and granted First Amendment protections. Project Veritas regularly carries out undercover stings, surveillance operations and ambush interviews, mostly against liberal groups and journalists…
Some backstory, from a longer thread:
NY Times reporters uncovered how the right wing group Project Veritas has employed former spies to infiltrate and discredit political opponents using deceptive practices. Now Project Veritas is engaged in a campaign of harassment against those reporters. https://t.co/GifAbpEzWt pic.twitter.com/xHWEU9i9IA
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) March 12, 2022
You might think that online threats are just the cost of being a reporter. Project Veritas has gone further, stalking the reporters, and sharing videos where they attack them. pic.twitter.com/veosnkFCQB
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) March 12, 2022
In addition to pursuing Nixonian dirty tricks against its partisan opponents on a vast scale, Project Veritas also pushed the Big Lie. https://t.co/2qHEobB4Ty
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) March 12, 2022
Project Veritas has also tried to muzzle the NY Times through the courts in a closely watched 1st amendment case. Something is fundamentally broken if we can't distinguish between organizations that undermine our democracy and ones to protect it. https://t.co/jDnZvPzWva
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) March 12, 2022
… The Times has previously reported that the story of Project Veritas’s involvement with the diary began in the months leading up to Election Day.
In July 2020, a single mother of two moved into the rented home of a former boyfriend in Delray Beach, Fla. The woman, Aimee Harris, a Trump supporter, told the former boyfriend that she had little money, had nowhere to live and was in a bitter custody dispute. Shortly after moving into the rental, Ms. Harris learned that Ms. Biden — also a friend of the former boyfriend — had been staying at the home earlier that year during the pandemic.
Ms. Biden had moved back to the Philadelphia area in June 2020, around the time her father clinched the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. She stored a couple of bags of her belongings at the rental house along with her diary, and she told her friend, who was leasing the home, that she planned to return to retrieve her things in the fall.
In August, Ms. Harris reached out to Robert Kurlander, a friend who had been sentenced to 40 months in prison in the 1990s on a federal fraud charge and had expressed anti-Biden sentiments online, to say she had found the diary. The two believed they could sell it, allowing Ms. Harris to help pay for the lawyers representing her in the custody dispute…
Project Veritas told a federal judge that on Oct. 12, Mr. O’Keefe sent an email telling his team that he had made the decision not to publish a story about the diary, adding, “We have no doubt the document is real” but that reactions to its publication would be “characterized as a cheap shot.” The date provided by Mr. O’Keefe for the email was shortly after the call to Ms. Biden.
But four days after Mr. O’Keefe told his staff that it would not publish the diary, a top lawyer for Project Veritas told Mr. Biden’s campaign that it had the diary and wanted to interview Mr. Biden on camera about it, The Times reported in December.
Less than a week after that, Project Veritas finalized a deal with Mr. Kurlander and Ms. Harris to buy the rights to publish the diary for $40,000, wired them the money and signaled that the group planned to soon publish it, according a person with knowledge of the case.
In the end, Project Veritas chose not to publish. Instead, an obscure right-wing website published the diary in late October, but it got little attention before the election. Mr. O’Keefe was furious, and some within Project Veritas thought that one of its own operatives, frustrated with the group’s unwillingness to publish the diary, had leaked it…
Not *us*, guys! Totally not our fault this got out!…[wink, wink]
… About two weeks later, F.B.I. agents obtained search warrants to raid the homes of Mr. O’Keefe and two of his operatives: Mr. Meads and Eric Cochran, both of whom left the organization after the diary project. In the case of Mr. Meads, his lawyer said the F.B.I. broke down his apartment door. Court documents indicate that the F.B.I. seized 47 devices, including a dozen phones from Mr. Meads.
And of course, as has been obvious to anyone with a brain, Project Veritas has nothing to do with journalism. It's a criminal operation designed to use subterfuge to attack Dems. All the 'journalists' and press freedom groups who went to bat for them look like idiots.
— Centrism Fan Acct ?? (@Wilson__Valdez) March 21, 2022
Baud
Oooh, hidden post.
Gravenstone
Not sure I’d care if I provided them video documentation of my crime at the time, but shattering O’Keefe’s kneecaps (as a starting point) would feel mighty cathartic.
Old School
Good thing Biden’s children don’t work in the White House if they are going to keep leaving stuff laying around all over the place.
Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@Old School: Would the GQP numb-nuts recognize a chain of custody if one bit them?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Gravenstone:Normally I don’t approve of violence, but O’Keefe being beaten nearly to death on pay view video sounds like a grand idea. Not because of anything personal, it’s O’Keefe, and guy really has a punchable face.
And I mean, just imagine O’keefe, bleeding and sobbing on the ground as he spat out his own broken teeth, it’s, just, well.. it would the one moment O’keefe did any good in this word, wouldn’t it?
Chief Oshkosh
Why is O’Keefe running around free? I thought he was still under some sort of house arrest.
Chief Oshkosh
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Sure, but what you really want from O’Keefe is the digital Rolodex. He and his asshole compatriots are supported by some deep pockets. THOSE are the people who really need a good public beating, maybe after they seen it happen to O’Keefe.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You know, this bit I could believe the FSB were coaching O’keefe; it’s the kind of petty, pointless cruelty the Russians love and O’Keefe is the kind of useless failure of a white boi that the Russians would gravitate towards.
Calouste
Project Veritas didn’t buy any rights, they paid $40,000 for something they made quite a bit of effort for to make sure it was actual stolen property. They paid that money because they thought it was stolen property, not because they thought that Harris has written a fictional version of Ashley Biden’s diary.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Chief Oshkosh: There you go interrupting my O’Keefe beating fantasies with all this base talk of the Public Good.
Also, someone would waste money on a serial failure like O’Keefe? Conservative Donors are dumber than I thought.
cain
I just feel bad for Ashley and Hunter – to be the subject of these dirty tricks. Also, fuck that Trump Supporter single mother – she really showing her kids what is right and wrong. Stealing someone’s property and trying to make money?
You can bet – that custody battle is going to get a little more wonky with all this given that the mother is trafficking is stolen goods.
Soprano2
This is easily as disgusting as what Linda Tripp did to Monica Lewinsky.
Calouste
The NYT aren’t as on your nose about the methods they use to undermine democracy as Project Veritas, but you shouldn’t mistake that for them actually trying to protect democracy. Democracy means that people whose parents couldn’t afford to pay for an Ivy League education have a say, and that’s a rather revolting idea to most employees of the NYT.
Chief Oshkosh
@Calouste: That’s my take, too. There are no publication “rights” being bought here. It’s straight up theft by taking AND by receiving, with a little bit of money changing hands in between.
Chief Oshkosh
@Soprano2: Well, Tripp first befriended Lewinsky in order to steal her life story. In the present story, a random piece of scum stole a diary and was trying to sell it to the highest bidder.
Sure doesn’t help with the custody case. I wouldn’t want this woman raising goldfish, much less children.
Ohio Mom
Somewhat off topic, but as a person who used to be a young woman who kept journals off and on, there is nothing as boring because it’s completely predictable as a young woman’s diary.
dc
Her diary is stolen property. Why aren’t the guilty parties arrested?
Xavier
Been to this well before… I think it’s dry now.
catclub
Two weeks later than Oct 12, 2020? Dates are not clear in this snippet.
Soprano2
@Ohio Mom: My mother found a bunch of my sister’s journals after her death. We both read them; they were mostly about my sister’s boyfriends, and how none of them were as good as she thought they were in the beginning. She seemed to want something that she found impossible to find. And yeah, it was mostly boring, although I did find out that one of her boyfriends told her he’d had a 3-way once. LOL
gene108
@Ohio Mom:
Ashley Biden was born in 1981. It’s more the diary of a middle-aged woman, which is probably just as dull.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You know at this week someone is going to be selling the used underwear of one of Biden’s kids by 2024.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Nobody in this circus “owns the rights” to that book.
Urza
Even if this is nothing now, they’ll bring it back up and claim it was suppressed in 2024. Probably with a hit about why are at least 2 of Biden’s kids addicts. Which is something proportionally more likely to occur for the children of celebrities.
debbie
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Time to Photoshop Putin doing his best J. Edgar Hoover.
debbie
Is this “Ms.” Harris under arrest yet or has she already snorted the evidence? ?
I hope the Democrats are prepared to go full Republican on this woman’s ass. What she did was absolutely despicable.
MikefromArlington
I don’t understand how a guy like O’Keefe hasn’t ended up in a dumpster yet.
PaulWartenberg
If there are any lawyers on here, can you all talk me down from my constant screaming that these media hacks ought to get charged for professional malpractice.
As a journalism grad (Florida, 1992), I remember my Journalism Ethics class which went into the issues of how to conduct ourselves when covering stories, especially the need to verify sources and conduct research. Every time I look at the likes of O’Keefe (and Brietbart before he kicked the bucket) and most of Fox Not-News, I see unethical acts like forging identities, editing interviews out of context, self-insertions into THE NARRATIVE, and spreading hearsay without verification. In all, I see a shoddy and fraudulent job performance by so-called “reporters” and pundits, whose actions violate a number of ethical and legal guidelines within the journalist profession.
Can’t they get sued for malpractice? While other professions do have malpractice laws in place, journalism itself doesn’t seem to. But should it fall under “professional negligence” as defined by malpractice laws in general?
They are selling false news as a fraudulent product. They are debasing the journalism profession every time they present misinformation. IMHO, this isn’t a First Amendment issue, it’s a liability issue.
Eolirin
@PaulWartenberg: A lot of the Fox News shows at least have gotten courts to recognize their status as entertainment and opinion rather than actual news. So even the low bar of journalistic ethics won’t apply.