A federal judge has largely rejected arguments lawyers for right-wing muckraking group Project Veritas related to privilege claims for documents in an investigation into the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary, saying the group’s assertion that it was acting as a journalistic enterprise and that it was covered under attorney-client privilege do not stand up.

Project Veritas claimed that it is protected under the First Amendment for its efforts to purchase the diary, stolen from the president’s daughter by a former housemate who found the book in personal belongings Ms. Biden said she would retrieve after moving out of the house in Florida. Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander pleaded guilty for stealing the book and transporting the stolen property over state lines to try to facilitate the sale to right-wing interests; both are cooperating with prosecutors.

Retired federal judge Barbara Jones reviewed the documents flagged by a Department of Justice filter team as potentially covered by privilege.  The materials in question relate to Project Veritas reportedly obtaining the dairy from Harris–she admitted to receiving $20,000 for it–and trying to sell it on to high-dollar Republican donors to use during the 2020 presidential campaign to benefit Donald Trump.  Project Veritas elected to not publish the diary; it was.

Federal investigators executed three search warrants on the Project Veritas offices and the residences of two others, a former PV employee and a current one.  They found evidence that James O’Keefe and other at Project Veritas knew the diary was stolen but still sought to purchase it.  Noting that the “materials are relevant to the crimes under investigation [relating to the purchase and transportation of stolen material across state lines], and they are not reasonably available from other sources,” Jones rejected PV’s argument that the documents were aspects of reporting because the documents obtained related to non-confidential information shared with investigators by the cooperating witnesses.

James also rejected attorney-client privilege claims on ten of fourteen documents challenged by the PV legal team based on crime-fraud exceptions, noting privilege held for two documents, and it didn’t apply to two other pieces of correspondence that did not seek or offer legal advice.  “With respect to the 14 documents that I evaluated for the crime fraud exception, the government has, with respect to 10 documents, satisfied its burden of showing that the communications in issue were in furtherance of the crimes or fraud.