The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) responded to Project Veritas on Thursday after the organization claimed President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice had been spying on them for 16 months.
In a letter to U.S. District Judge for SDNY Analisa Torres, Damian Williams claimed that the “accusations of Government misconduct are baseless” and that “the Government did not mislead the Court.” (RELATED: REPORT: Project Veritas Videos Stokes Turmoil At NYT, Executive Editor Calls Out Ensnared Reporter)
NEW: Biden DOJ effectively admits in new court filing it secretly subpoenaed emails of James O’Keefe and other journalists at Project Veritas. Filing confirms DOJ withheld info from the Court supervising the review of Veritas documents.
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) March 24, 2022
“The subjects of a grand jury investigation are not entitled to information about that investigation or to dictate how the Government should conduct that investigation during its pendency,” the letter states.
“A Magistrate Judge determined that there was probable cause to believe that the accounts contained evidence or instrumentalities of a federal crime,” the letter goes on to say.
Project Veritas claimed Tuesday that the DOJ granted seven secret orders, warrants and subpoenas from six judges within the SDNY to force Microsoft to provide the journalists’ constitutionally protected information. The organization’s founder, James O’Keefe, called the DOJ’s alleged actions a “fundamental intolerable abridgment of the First Amendment.”
The FBI raided the homes of Project Veritas journalists, including O’Keefe’s, in November after reports alleging that the diary of Ashley Biden, President Joe Biden’s daughter, was stolen. O’Keefe said the emails obtained by the DOJ go back to January 2020, “eight months before we knew the diary existed.”