Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe publicly criticized the FBI raid that took place early Saturday morning in connection with the diary of Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden.
“This is an attack on the First Amendment by the Department of Justice,” O’Keefe told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “I’m calling upon all journalists to take a stand against this.”
“A source comes to us with information, I didn’t even decide to publish it. If they can do this to me, if they can do it to this journalist and raid my home and take my reporter notes, they’ll do it to any journalist,” he warned.
“This is about something very fundamental in this country. I don’t know which direction this country is going in, but journalists everywhere have to rise up because we broke no laws here,” O’Keefe explained.
FBI agents “handcuffed me and threw me against the hallway,” the journalist said, describing the raid. In addition to confiscating his phone and notes, the FBI did the same to the homes of other individuals connected to the organization.
“I woke up to a pre-dawn raid,” O’Keefe said. “Banging on my door, I went to my door to answer the door and there were 10 FBI agents with a battering ram, white blinding lights, they turned me around, handcuffed me and threw me against the hallway. I was partially clothed in front of my neighbors. They confiscated my phone. They raided my apartment. On my phone were many of my reporters’ notes. A lot of my sources unrelated to this story and a lot of confidential donor information to our news organization.”
“I’ve heard ‘the process is the punishment.’ I didn’t really understand what that meant until this weekend. And Sean, I wouldn’t wish this on any journalist,” O’Keefe said.
O’Keefe was accompanied by his attorney, Paul Calli, who told Hannity that Project Veritas was approached by tipsters who had possession of the missing diary.
Calli revealed that Project Veritas paid the tipster money for the “right to publish the material,” which the organization decided not to publish after they could not verify the authenticity of the information. The organization later turned in the diary to law enforcement. The attorney also pushed back on the assumption that the diary was “stolen,” affirming that “nobody knows if that’s the case.”
