Project Veritas claims the federal government seeks to “financially punish” and “tax” the conservative group by demanding it shoulder all the costs of special master review in a legal fight over materials seized in FBI raids last year.
Lawyers for Project Veritas urged a federal judge to reject a U.S. attorney’s objection to a request by the special master, Barbara Jones, that the government bear half the cost of her team’s fees and expenses and instead order the investigative organization to cover the costs in full. The judge, Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York, appointed the special master in December, moving against the will of federal prosecutors and handing a victory to Project Veritas, which sought a third party to make sure authorities do not gain access to materials protected by attorney-client privilege and safeguard the group’s First Amendment rights.
“The exercise of First Amendment rights is a guaranteed right, not a luxury subject to taxation at the government’s whim,” the organization’s lawyer, Paul Calli, wrote in a letter to Torres dated Monday.
“The government argues that an upstart journalism organization with a current annual budget that recently hovers around $22 million is better suited to fund Special Master proceedings than a goliath arm of the U.S. government featuring a long-standing bloated budget, currently at $31.1 billion,” the letter continues.
FEDERAL COURT ORDERS SPECIAL MASTER TO REVIEW MATERIAL SEIZED BY FBI IN PROJECT VERITAS RAIDS
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams petitioned Torres last week that no portion of the special master’s funding fall on the U.S. government, writing that “the Court should require that James E. O’Keefe, III, Eric Cochran, Spencer Meads, and Project Veritas (the ‘Petitioners’) bear the full cost of the Special Master’s compensation and expenses.”
“To the extent O’Keefe and Project Veritas appear to suggest that Project Veritas does not have sufficient funds to contribute to the Special Master’s compensation because it is an organization merely ‘armed with a cell phone and a website’ … the Government notes that its most recent, publicly available tax filings — for tax year 2019 — show more than $12 million in revenue, of which nearly $400,000 was paid as compensation to O’Keefe,” the U.S. attorney letter continued.
The U.S. attorney also urged the judge to reject the suggestion by petitioners that because an “interim allocation may be amended to reflect a decision on the merits … judgment should be reserved about which party shall ultimately bear the cost of the Special Master’s duties.” The federal prosecutor said this is because the court is not considering the validity of the search warrants.
Project Veritas objected to the government bringing up the ability of the petitioners to pay, arguing, “The government wishes to condition the right to a free press under the First Amendment upon the income of the subject journalist.”
FBI agents raided multiple locations tied to the group, including the home of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, in November. Federal prosecutors said they seized phones and electronic devices as part of an investigation into interstate transportation of stolen property. The raids were reportedly part of an investigation into the disappearance of a diary belonging to Ashley Biden, the youngest daughter of President Joe Biden.
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Harmeet Dhillon, another attorney for Project Veritas, has stressed that her client did not publish the alleged diary. Instead, it was a right-wing website, National File, that claims it obtained a digital copy from a Project Veritas “whistleblower” before posting its contents online.
“The DOJ well knew our client did not have the dairy. What were they really after? I think they were really after Project Veritas’s telephones with contacts of lawyers and legal communications — contacts of many, many sources in the Biden administration, which is riddled with corruption, as you pointed out — and contacts with conservative donors who they’d like to harass. We have the playbook from the Obama years. That’s what this is about,” she told Fox News host Tucker Carlson last month.
