MICHAEL WALSH: How The New York Times abuses the ‘public’s right to know.’
Now the shoe is on the other foot, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of journalists: a judge in the New York State Supreme Court (despite its name, not the top court in the state) has ruled against the Times in its ongoing attempt to destroy independent journalist James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas by publishing private communications with his lawyers regarding a lost diary purportedly belonging to President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley. The Times and Project Veritas have been locked in legal combat since O’Keefe filed a 2020 defamation suit against the Times.
In the suit, O’Keefe—who first came to public attention in 2009 with his “sting” videos against the leftist community-organizing group Acorn, now defunct, and which put Andrew Breitbart’s “Big” sites on the national map—alleges that the Times defamed him by claiming he has “a long history of releasing manipulated or selectively edited footage” and that his methods were “deceptive” and “a coordinated disinformation campaign.” (Full disclosure: I was the founding editor of Breitbart’s Big Journalism in 2010; that site has long since been folded into Breitbart.com.)
Well, nothing says “deceptive” like fencing stolen property that serves your ideological needs under the guise of freedom of the press, but here we are. The Times and other legacy media have abused the Pentagon Papers decision for years, often by hiding behind another errant Supreme Court decision involving the Gray Lady, New York Times Co. v Sullivan (1964), which essentially gave newspapers carte blanche to slander their enemies without fear or legal penalty.
The judge in the Ashley Biden diary case, Charles D. Wood, has forbidden the Times to publish the Project Veritas documents—protected lawyer-client material, it should be noted—that it mysteriously obtained, and ordered the return all the physical copies to O’Keefe and the destruction of any and all electronic copies it may have.
This brought an immediate bleat from publisher A.G. Sulzberger, the latest in the long line of Sulzbergers who control the family-run paper: “This ruling should raise alarms not just for advocates of press freedoms but for anyone concerned about the dangers of government overreach into what the public can and cannot know. In defiance of law settled in the Pentagon Papers case, this judge has barred The Times from publishing information about a prominent and influential organization that was obtained legally in the ordinary course of reporting.”
Well, that’s rich. Just how the Times got the material the Times, of course, won’t say—so much for the public’s right to know. Most likely, it was leaked to the newspaper by the FBI, which conducted an intimidating November raid on Project Veritas, including on O’Keefe himself, during which he was reportedly handcuffed.
But why was the FBI acting like the Bidens’ private Praetorian Guard in the first place? No one alleges that Ashley Biden’s diary was stolen, and even if it was, so what? A lost diary, even one belonging to yet another troubled Biden offspring, is not a federal case. And in any event, Project Veritas never published the contents of the diary. The FBI investigation was concerned with “how a diary stolen from President Biden’s daughter, Ashley, came to be publicly disclosed a week and a half before the 2020 presidential election.”
As it turns out, the diary was simply left behind in Florida by a “rehabbing” Ashley, where it was found by a third party and offered around to various outlets.
The press and the FBI are pretty clearly just partners in defending the Democrats by any means necessary. This corruption — because that’s what it is — has already destroyed their reputations, but there should be a much greater reckoning.