Not satisfied with authorizing the FBI to target Virginia mom’s and dad’s protesting the teaching of racism in their kids schools — with the parents renamed “domestic terrorists”?
Now the highly politicized Biden Department of Justice has turned to target James O’Keefe of Project Veritas fame, and others associated with the group. The New York Times, no less, reports that the FBI conducted a dawn raid — 6:00 a.m. — on journalist O’Keefe’s New York apartment “in connection with a diary reported to have been stolen from Ashley Biden, President Biden’s daughter.”
Curiously O’Keefe was requested not to reveal that the prosecutor for the U.S. Southern District had gotten a subpoena from a grand jury to conduct an investigation. But, somehow, in some unfathomable fashion, within an hour of his being told this, the New York Times had the story. Imagine that.
The diary in question was brought to Project Veritas by an unidentified tipster. O’Keefe not only did not publish the diary — the contents, he said, were unverifiable — he tried to return it to Biden’s lawyers. They refused to take it, he says, so he turned it over to law enforcement. For this the FBI raided his apartment at six in the morning in order to scoop up whatever they chose. Project Veritas has also “recently received a grand jury subpoena” on this, and a federal prosecutor in Manhattan is investigating O’Keefe and others now or formerly associated with Project Veritas.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley asked the obvious: Why is the FBI doing this?
John Hinderaker of Power Line has done some digging about the origin of the diary. It turns out that like half-brother Hunter, Ashley Biden apparently had some sort of problem that had her in a “rehab facility,” in her case in 2019. The diary was found in her room when she departed. The contents are, as diaries tend to be, deeply personal but with no Joe Biden bombshells.
But both Turley, Hinderaker, and the editorial board of the New York Post are asking a version of the same question: What in the world is the FBI doing raiding a journalist’s home — at dawn no less — to retrieve a diary the journalist did not have? And even if he did, as Turley points out, publishing the contents of a private diary is not a federal crime. So why the subpoena? Why is the U.S. Southern District investigating at all?
The answer is obvious — and Hinderaker got right to the heart of that answer, saying:
The FBI’s once-stellar reputation has been badly tarnished in recent years, and many millions of Americans now see the Bureau as a politicized agency that has become, in important ways, an arm of the Democratic Party. The Case of the Missing Diary may be trivial in itself, but the fact that the FBI is now executing search warrants on the homes of political opponents of the Biden administration, with no national interest at stake other than the reputation of the Biden family, lends support to that suspicion.
Exactly.
Question: where is the media outrage at this? In the long ago and faraway — the Nixon era — the New York Times went all the way to the Supreme Court to defend its right to publish a major government document — the Pentagon Papers. The Papers were a lengthy and confidential study of just how the United States ended up in the Vietnam War. An anti-war think tank consultant who had worked on the Papers — Daniel Ellsberg — photocopied the document and leaked it to the Times. When the Nixon Administration got wind of what was afoot it took the Times to court to stop publication, and succeeded for fifteen days. Then the Supreme Court, in a major decision, handed down its decision (in a 6-3 vote) in New York Times Co. v. United States. The Court said plainly that the Times had a First Amendment right to publish what it received — and so it did.
The fact here is that James O’Keefe, like the New York Times, received a document — in this case the Ashley Biden diary. Which is hardly a secret, classified government document. But unlike the Times in the Pentagon Papers case, O’Keefe decided not to publish. Unlike Daniel Ellsberg, O’Keefe had no role in getting the diary in the first place — he merely received it from a source — and decided not to publish. He decided as well to try and return it to Biden’s lawyers, who refused it. So he turned it over to law enforcement, as mentioned.
But even if James O’Keefe had published the diary — and now others have — he was well within his First Amendment right to do so.
The very serious problem here is precisely as Jonathan Turley, John Hinderaker, and the New York Post have made clear. The Biden Department of Justice has been thoroughly corrupted by politics. It is using the DOJ and the FBI, in this case, to target a journalist simply because they don’t like him.
Whether it is busy issuing a subpoena to James O’Keefe or conducting a police-state style dawn raid on his apartment, this is a straight up and decidedly political targeting of Americans the Biden administration sees as its opponents. It is corrupt — and very dangerous.
So where is the mainstream liberal media?
The sound you hear is crickets.
Not good. Not good at all.
