Several observers have pointed out the terrible optics and even worse legal and cultural implications of the FBI’s raids earlier this month on three undercover journalists’ homes. Since the reporters’ organization, Project Veritas, is a political opponent of the American regime, the raids echo government behavior in unfree countries such as Russia, China, and Turkey.
Yet there’s another, less remarked, aspect to this story. It’s the raids’ effect of protecting a longtime, top-tier deep state information operations partner, The New York Times.
Project Veritas is a threat to The New York Times, not only in some of its undercover reporting about Times employees but also in its lawsuit against the Times for defamation. Curiously, then, The New York Times appeared to be aware of the raids about as soon as they commenced, as well as possibly obtaining private information about Project Veritas from the FBI operation.
Project Veritas founder O’Keefe noted: “Within an hour of one of our reporter’s homes being secretly raided by the FBI, The New York Times we are currently suing for defamation contacted the Project Veritas reporter to ask for comment. We do not know how The New York Times knew about the execution of a search warrant at our reporter’s home, or the subject matter of the search warrant, as the grand jury investigation is secret.”
Four business days after O’Keefe’s apartment was ransacked by the FBI, The New York Times on Nov. 11 published information from internal Project Veritas legal documents. It’s currently not public whether The Times obtained those documents from discovery in Project Veritas’s defamation suit or from an FBI leaker (or leakers). Project Veritas lawyers say they suspect a leaker.
“We have a disturbing situation of the U.S. attorney’s office or the FBI tipping off the New York Times to each of the raids on Project Veritas current and former employees,” O’Keefe lawyer Harmeet Dhillon told Tucker Carlson the evening of Nov. 11.
The FBI currently claims the raids stem from Project Veritas viewing what is alleged to be President Joe Biden’s daughter’s diary. Last week, a judge extended a ban on the Times publishing articles about Project Veritas until at least Dec. 1, reportedly due to its publication of those internal Project Veritas documents.
The FBI’s raids on Project Veritas, then, had the effect of protecting not just the Biden family but also The New York Times. It’s yet another episode in a long and troubled history of both the FBI and New York Times wildly abusing their power.
The FBI Has Been Politicized From Its Origins
From its very beginning, the FBI was racked with abuse of power. The FBI’s own history notes that “In the early twenties, the agency was no model of efficiency. It had a growing reputation for politicized investigations. In 1923, in the midst of the Teapot Dome scandal that rocked the Harding Administration, the nation learned that Department of Justice officials had sent Bureau agents to spy on members of Congress who had opposed its policies.” Spy on members of Congress — who are supposed to control the FBI.
The infamous J. Edgar Hoover who took the helm after that scandal kept secret police files on his political opponents and used them unlawfully, including to keep multiple presidents from firing him and to manipulate U.S. senators. That’s called “blackmail.”
Things haven’t changed. The long chronicle of FBI abuse of power has only lengthened, and persists to this day. Most recently, there’s the evidence still coming out about FBI incitement and provocations related to the Jan. 6 altercations and the trumped-up Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot.
A whistleblower recently claimed the FBI is surveiling moms and dads mad at public schools. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s denials about this don’t look too well against the backdrop of Democrat spy agency heads repeatedly lying to Congress under oath, as well as on TV, and facing zero consequences for doing so.
Those are only the most recent stories made public. One of the biggest stories of the past five years has been Spygate, the collusion between Democrat politicians and spy agencies including the FBI to frame and obstruct the man Americans elected president in 2016.
The FBI’s election interference also affected 2020. As Victor Davis Hanson noted recently, the FBI “did not disclose that it had possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop at a time when the media was erroneously declaring the computer inauthentic.” The FBI had possession of that laptop in 2019, in fact. As we now know, polling indicates that if the public had been informed of that story, Joe Biden likely would not have generated enough votes to declare himself president.
Hanson also resurfaces “the agency’s inability to follow up on clear information about the dangers posed by criminals as diverse as the Tsarnaev brothers, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.”
Without writing a book about the FBI’s endemic failures on every level — investigative, political, constitutional — suffice it to say that the past five Trump years may have intensified this politicized use of police power, but they are not in any way an anomaly. It almost appears as if comprising a secret police is what the agency exists to do, using the law enforcement part as its cover story.
The NYT Has Propagandized For Tyrants For a Century
As Ashley Rindberg writes in this year’s “The Grey Lady Winked,” The New York Times has a long history of pimping propaganda for totalitarians and tyrants. It’s about as old as the FBI’s institutional history of using police powers for politics instead of justice, dating back to at least the 1920s.
The New York Times published reams of positive and Pulitzer Prize-winning press for Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, and now Xi Jinping and Joe Biden. It is quite literally a propaganda mouthpiece for mass murderers and tyrants.
Rindberg’s book documents that, and I won’t reprise his work here. Suffice it to say, The New York Times chose to prioritize manipulating readers over reporting the truth long ago, while very successfully claiming to do the opposite.
In numerous instances, the FBI and New York Times have worked together to manipulate public affairs. In fact, The New York Times has been a routine location for FBI and other intelligence leakers to plant news stories that often turn out later to be false but still accomplish political goals. In other words, they help the deep state manufacture and spread propaganda.
Just consider a few recent stories we know about that demonstrate this. There are plenty more, many related to starting or perpetuating wars, which are lucrative for intelligence agencies and news organizations alike.
Without intelligence agency leaks, often of false information, to The New York Times and similar outlets, the Spygate attempt to subvert the 2016 election might not have come off at all. The FBI was deeply involved in these leaks and the whole collusion conspiracy, to the point that my colleague Mollie Hemingway described intelligence agencies and corporate media as “co-conspirators” in the operation.
The Times’s use to FBI leakers hasn’t been limited to Spygate, of course. As a recent example, The New York Times ran a false story about the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick after Jan. 6, 2021, which suppressed public discourse about election integrity by falsely linking those concerns to murder and providing political cover for ongoing show trials of Democrats’ political opponents. Another obvious example is governments’ indefinite suspension of citizens’ rights and normal lives in response to COVID, which was clearly enabled by media hysteria exemplified by The New York Times’ COVID “death map.”
Take a step back for a second and imagine the power of being able to blackmail any American, member of Congress, or the president. That’s the power to control government itself. Consider also that the power to determine what the public knows also confers massive political power in a democratic republic. Control public opinion, and you control the country.
This is what the FBI and New York Times have done in the past century, sometimes in concert. That’s why the FBI raiding an antagonist of its longtime information operations partner, and possibly leaking information obtained in that raid to that partner, is no surprise at all.
As long as such ops keep working, there will be more government-media joint information operations designed to keep control of the United States well out of voters’ hands.
