A lawyer for Project Veritas, Elizabeth Locke, said in a statement on Thursday: “We are pleased that the Appellate Division denied The Times’s overreaching request to vacate the order.” She added that she was “confident” that the appeals court would ultimately affirm “that The Times violated Veritas’s substantial rights by acquiring and publishing attorney-client privileged materials in the midst of ongoing litigation.”
In a phone interview on Thursday, Mr. O’Keefe said: “Defamation is not a First Amendment-protected right; publishing the other litigants’ attorney-client privileged documents is not a protected First Amendment right.”
Last year, in coverage unrelated to the lawsuit, The Times reported on an effort by the Justice Department to investigate Project Veritas for a possible role in stealing a diary that belonged to President Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden. In the course of reporting on that investigation, The Times published an article in November that included excerpts from memos prepared by a lawyer for Project Veritas, who described legal strategies that would allow the group to engage in deceptive reporting practices that did not violate federal law.
The memos predated the libel case against The Times by several years. But lawyers for Project Veritas accused The Times of intruding on its attorney-client privilege rights, arguing that the newspaper’s publication of the memos amounted to an effort to embarrass an opponent in active litigation.
An order in November by Justice Charles D. Wood of State Supreme Court in Westchester County ordered The Times to cease publication of any of the relevant Project Veritas documents. In December, the judge rejected The Times’s efforts to have the order thrown out. He also ordered The Times to immediately destroy any electronic copies of the documents and turn over its physical copies.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/business/media/project-veritas-new-york-times.html
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