Judge rips the Times on docs
Says it must return confidential memos to conservative group
The New York Times must immediately turn over confidential legal memos that it obtained and published in a story about the conservative sting-operation media organization Project Veritas, a Westchester Supreme Court justice ruled in an order made public Friday.
Supreme Court Justice Charles Wood ruled that The Times violated Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe’s right to attorney-client privilege by publishing communications between O’Keefe and his lawyer Benjamin Barr.
The Times vowed an immediate appeal, saying the judge cannot decide what is or is not public knowledge.
“This ruling should raise alarms not just for advocates of press freedoms but for anyone concerned about the dangers of government overreach into what the public can and cannot know,” said A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of the Times, in a statement.
Wood blasted the Times in a scathing 28-page ruling.
“The court rejects the Times’ position that Project Veritas’ attorney-client communications are a matter of public concern,” he wrote.
“Some things are not fodder for public consideration and consumption. These memoranda, and hundreds of thousands of similar attorney-client privileged documents that are in homes, offices and businesses in every village, town and city in this nation, are only between an attorney and a client, and it does not matter one
bit who the attorney and client are.”
Project Veritas, a right-wing media organization, was founded in 2010 by O’Keefe and is wellknown for its undercover sting videos.
Wood’s decision came in a defamation suit Project Veritas filed against the Times in 2020 over five articles that questioned Project Veritas’ tactics and even
quoted researchers referring to the company’s work as a “coordinated disinformation campaign.”
But the newest twist in the media battle came when the Times published a story in November that cited internal documents between O’Keefe and Barr, in an article headlined, “Project Veritas and the Line Between Journalism and Political Spying.”
The article quoted heavily from communications between O’Keefe and Barr, including a 2017 instance in which Barr warned Project Veritas of the criminality of making false statements to federal officials as part of one of its stories.
Project Veritas’ lawyers called on Wood to force the Times to return the documents and take down the article. The story was still online Friday night, hours after Wood’s decision became public.
Wood agreed with the Project Veritas lawyers, and ordered the Times to remove the internal documents from the internet — which presumably means the newspaper will have to take down or make immense changes to the story.
The Times also has to return the attorney-client memos in its possession to Project Veritas, the judge ruled.
Lawyers for Project Veritas were pleased with the decision.
“Christmas came early for our ... clients,” tweeted Harmeet Dhillon, whose firm reps O’Keefe and Project Veritas.