A judge in New York ruled Friday that the New York Times must return memos it obtained from an attorney for a conservative activist group.
A New York state court judge upheld his temporary order in favor of the conservative activist group. The New York Times was going to report on memos written years ago by Benjamin Barr, an attorney for Project Veritas, which the paper published last month.
The New York Times reported on Barr's advice to the members of Project Veritas about how to spy on government employees in order to gauge their opinion of then-president Donald Trump.
The New York Times' argument that the memos involved issues of public concern was rejected by Wood. The public's business is not to be aware of the legal advice that a client gets from its lawyer, he wrote.
The New York Times was ordered to give back the documents obtained by its journalists over the course of reporting on Project Veritas' methods.
"This ruling should raise alarms not just for advocates of press freedom but for anyone concerned about the dangers of government overreach into what the public can and cannot know," he said. The judge in the Pentagon Papers case barred The Times from publishing information about a prominent and influential organization that was obtained legally in the ordinary course of reporting.
Justice Wood decided what The Times can and cannot report on. The paper's editorial board wrote that the First Amendment isn't supposed to work that way.
The newspaper is appealing.
The defamation suit was filed by Project Veritas in November of 2020 after the New York Times published a story about a video that claimed to show voter fraud in Minnesota. The video was reported to be part of an orchestrated "disinformation campaign" by the NYT.
Wood's latest ruling addresses more recent reporting by the New York Times on Project Veritas' methods of obtaining information, while the parties await a decision on how their dispute over those stories should proceed. The Times reported last month that the FBI raided the home of James O'Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, as part of an investigation into the disappearance of a diary from the daughter of President Joe Biden.
Elizabeth Locke, an attorney for Project Veritas, said in a statement that the New York Times' behavior was irregular and outside the boundaries of law. The Court's thoughtful and well researched opinion is a victory for the First Amendment for all journalists.
The Times is blinded by its hatred of Project Veritas and everything it does results in a self-inflicted wound, said O'Keefe in his own statement Friday.
The memos written by Barr were argued to be fair game by the New York Times' attorneys.
Attorneys for The New York Times argued in a November filing that a news organization is not prevented from reporting on information obtained outside of the discovery process.
