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Pair pleads guilty to stealing Ashley Biden's journal, selling it to Project Veritas [1]

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Date: 2022-08-25

Project Veritas has insisted to anyone who would listen that it believed the diary had been lawfully obtained, and that prosecutors have been trampling on the company’s First Amendment rights. But according to the one-count criminal indictment to which Harris and Kurlander pleaded, when she met with operatives from Project Veritas—described only as “an organization in Mamaroneck, New York”—Harris described “the circumstances of how she obtained” the diary. In other words, Project Veritas was aware that the diary was stolen.

That by itself would be enough to put James O’Keefe—the founder of Project Veritas—and friends in the soup. But this nugget in the criminal information ought to sound Project Veritas’ death knell:

After the meeting, and at the Organization’s request, HARRIS and KURLANDER returned to Florida to obtain more of the Victim’s property in order to provide it to the Organization. They later met with an Organization employee in Florida and gave that employee more of the Victim’s stolen property, believing that the Organization would transport or cause the transport of the stolen property from Florida to the Organization’s offices in New York, which the Organization subsequently did. The Organization subsequently paid HARRIS and KURLANDER each $20,000 for the stolen property.

In other words, Project Veritas has effectively been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to steal a trove of material from Ashley Biden.

I first learned about this when Will Sommer of The Daily Beast shared coverage of the guilty plea from Axios’ Lachlan Markay. His assessment of the situation is generous, to put it mildly:

x Very interesting detail in this DOJ press release on the James O'Keefe case — it alleges the thefts were done at Project Veritas's "request." If PV really was involved in orchestrating theft, that would go way beyond any journalistic protections. https://t.co/CAyCupNwEJ — Will Sommer (@willsommer) August 25, 2022

O’Keefe and company didn’t just go “way beyond any journalistic protections.” There were already a number of reasons why Project Veritas should have forfeited its right to exist long ago. It tried to plant a bogus story about Roy Moore in hopes of making The Washington Post look like a nest of liberal hacks out to stop a good Christian man from getting to the Senate—and did so even when O’Keefe himself believed Moore’s accusers were credible. It also first published an account of a postal worker in Pennsylvania who falsely claimed that he’d heard one of his colleagues being told to backdate ballots.

And now Project Veritas effectively stands accused of telling people to steal from the daughter of the then-Democratic candidate for president. Even if criminal charges aren’t brought against Project Veritas, it is clear beyond real-world doubt that this outfit absolutely, positively must be driven out of existence.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/25/2118787/-Prosecutors-claim-Project-Veritas-asked-people-who-stole-Ashley-Biden-s-diary-to-commit-other-thefts

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