US Authorities Secretly Accessed Project Veritas Emails: Court Documents

The Department of Justice building in Washington D.C. on Feb. 9, 2022. Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

Federal authorities obtained communications from Project Veritas emails dating back to early 2020, the nonprofit journalism group alerted a federal judge on March 22.

Search warrants and non-disclosure orders obtained by Project Veritas and submitted to the judge show that the government ordered Microsoft, which the nonprofit uses for its email accounts, to hand over reams of information regarding multiple Project Veritas email addresses.

FBI agents described the information as “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Multiple magistrate judges signed off on the warrants and orders, which compelled Microsoft not to disclose their existence.

Two of the orders were signed after a judge appointed a special master, or a retired lawyer, to sift through materials federal authorities obtained from raids of Project Veritas’s founder James O'Keefe and other personnel.

The FBI has been investigating the possible theft of a diary belonging to Ashley Biden, President Joe Biden’s daughter, according to documents previously obtained by The Epoch Times. The bureau raided O'Keefe’s home and other locations as part of the probe, which Project Veritas and its lawyers say is baseless because they didn’t steal the diary and ultimately handed it over to local law enforcement in Florida.

The new documents show the government has been circumventing the special master, who was appointed to shield protected materials from federal investigators, Project Veritas lawyer Paul Calli told U.S. District Judge Analise Torres, the Obama appointee overseeing the case, on Tuesday.

By the time Torres appointed the special master on Nov. 10, 2021, “the government had already seized Project Veritas’s journalistic and attorney-client privileged materials, without regard to topic or the aforementioned privileges and far outside the relevant time period,” Calli said, noting that the warrants sought emails from eight journalists and a human resources manager.

“It appears that the government misled this court by omission, failing to disclose during the briefing and arguments over the appointment of a special master that the government had already obtained through these surreptitious actions many of the privileged communications this court charged the special master with protecting. The government’s clandestine invasions of journalist’s communications corrode the rule of law,” he added.

Project Veritas is asking the court to immediately halt the government’s access to the materials it obtained from Microsoft, similar to how Torres paused access to the materials obtained during the raids. The judge should also order the government to make clear whether it employed a filter team to go through the data from Microsoft, what data government agents reviewed, and whether the government obtained materials from other third parties.

The Department of Justice did not pick up the phone or return a voicemail.

Microsoft, which had in a filing had asked the court to allow it to alert Project Veritas to the government warrants and judicial orders, told The Epoch Times in an email that its policy is “to always push back on legal demands for enterprise customer data and to notify the customer as soon as we’re legally able if we’re forced to comply with such orders.”

“We did both in this instance,” a company spokesperson said, adding: “We’ve sued the U.S. government multiple times in recent years to protect the rights of our customers, and we successfully pushed back on nearly a third of all requests for enterprise customer data from law enforcement as reported in our latest Law Enforcement Request Report. We were prepared to sue again in this case.”