A New York trial court judge on Tuesday extended a ban blocking The New York Times from publishing legal documents and privileged materials from investigative journalism nonprofit Project Veritas.
At a nearly two-hour hearing in White Plains, Justice Charles Wood of the Westchester County Supreme Court extended his temporary ban, first imposed on Nov. 18, until at least Dec. 1.
The order covers memos written by a Project Veritas lawyer and obtained by The New York Times. It isn’t clear how the memos were obtained by the publication.
It comes after The NY Times recently published documents online that the paper said were from Project Veritas. The paper later took them down but a story describing them is still available on its website. Project Veritas lawyers say the documents were obtained improperly and their publication was not authorized by the group.
The paper successfully got a stay in discovery as it appeals the decision.
As the hearing began, Wood said the case involved a clash between “freedom of the speech and freedom of the press, and attorney-client privilege.”
NY Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said the outlet was disappointed that the order remains in place but will press its First Amendment concerns. “No libel plaintiffs should be permitted to use their litigation as a tool to silence press coverage about them,” she said.
The Epoch Times has contacted Project Veritas for comment.
Project Veritas lawyers previously called the paper’s acquiring of the privileged materials “a shocking display of unscrupulous gamesmanship.”
“The lack of any justification for The Times’s conduct betrays it for what it is: a bare and vindictive attempt to harm and embarrass a litigation adversary by completely disregarding the sanctity of the attorney-client relationship,” they told the court.
“We are troubled that The Times would publish and disseminate attorney-client privileged materials, written by a lawyer who is counsel of record in Project Veritas’s ongoing litigation against The Times, that were obviously stolen and provided to The Times without Project Veritas’s consent,” a lawyer wrote to New York Times lawyers.
The NY Times has not faced any prior restraint since 1971, when the Nixon administration unsuccessfully sought to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers detailing U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.
