New reporting this afternoon indicates that the Department of Justice secretly accessed Project Veritas' emails during the FBI's investigation into how the group obtained Ashley Biden's diary.
According to Project Veritas' lawyers, the Justice Department filed secret orders to get emails and additional confidential information from eight Project Veritas journalists through Microsoft Corporation.
WATCH:
DOJ allegedly prevented Microsoft from disclosing its orders to access Project Veritas' constitutionally protected information.
DOJ lawyers allegedly went so far as to undermine the authority of Judge Analisa Torres. They reportedly obtained gag orders against Microsoft from magistrates inclined to grant their requests.
According to attorney Paul Calli, the documents obtained by Project Veritas confirm the existence of a 16-month clandestine campaign to comb through Project Veritas' “journalistic and attorney-client privileged materials.” Calli estimates that the magistrates have access to 150,000 documents from Project Veritas that they shouldn't.
At no time was this shared with Judge Torres or Special Master Judge Barbara Jones, who Torres appointed to protect Project Veritas' “journalistic privileges.”
These bombshell claims, and others, came about in a court filing by Project Veritas' lawyers this afternoon.
As Business Insider reports:
“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,” lawyers for the group wrote.
The warrants allowed prosecutors to obtain all messages from an email account belonging to an unnamed Project Veritas employee between January 1, 2020 and January 26, 2021. They cover “evidence of communications regarding or in furtherance of the subject offenses, such as communications with or regarding Ashley Biden, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (and representatives thereof), and/or Ashley Biden's associates regarding her stolen property.” Lawyers for Project Veritas say that the group was unaware of the diary's existence until much later in 2020.
“The government had to know that nothing material could be learned by obtaining journalists' communications from months after the Ashley Biden diary and her belongings were in the hands of the local police,” they wrote in the filing.
A representative for the US Attorney's office in Manhattan declined to comment.
Already, the report of covert surveillance of American journalists is raising bipartisan concerns.
Unless the people at the DOJ/FBI who perpetrated these crimes face real consequences like jail time, termination and loss of pensions it means nothing except government has become so corrupt its not worth saving.