The O’Keefe Project: Notes toward an update

The story of the FBI raid on James O’Keefe and others associated with Project Veritas in the matter of Ashley Biden’s diary should be big news. The New York Times has devoted four stories to it, but the Times has a bone to pick with O’Keefe. The Times stories throb with hostility to Project Veritas and thrill to his humiliation. I have put in a request for an interview with Project Veritas attorney Harmeet Dhillon, whose publicist wrote us offering to arrange it, but I have struck out so far.

Recent related stories include “Judge Tries [?] to Block New York Times’s Coverage of Project Veritas” (New York Times) and “Judge Temporarily Blocks NY Times From Publishing Project Veritas Materials” (Newsmax). Project Veritas’s state court lawsuit against the Times is more generally the subject of J.V. Bennett’s column “It’s ‘a Goliath Against a David’ as the Times Prepares To Meet Veritas in Court” (New York Sun).

The Washington Post covered the order entered in the state court lawsuit in “Court bars New York Times from publishing Project Veritas memos in move called ‘unconstitutional’” (November 18). Erik Wemple’s Post column here (November 19) covers the same development. These stories include the Times statement on the timing of the raid and the publication of the story on Project Veritas’s legal memos: “We received the [Project Veritas] documents prior to the FBI executing its search warrants.” A lawyer for the Times, however, offers the more ambiguous denial that the memos were “obtained improperly.” Wemple intimates that the Project Veritas legal memos (“the documents”) were leaked to the Times by Project Veritas employees and therefore that the timing of the Times story on the memos was coincidental.

The Times story (November 11) on the Project Veritas memos was reported by Adam Goldman and Mark Mazzetti. Goldman covers the FBI for the Times. Mazzetti is described as a Washington investigative reporter for the Times — “a job he assumed after covering national security from The Times’s Washington bureau for 10 years. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia.” I infer that Goldman’s and Mazzetti’s source for the Project Veritas memos came from within the FBI/national security establishment. I am not inclined to swallow the Times’s statement or Wemple’s construction of it.

Seeking to follow developments in the Project Veritas story I have found Twitter a valuable resource. Below are tweets related to recent developments.

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