Activist judges

A New York trial court judge has upheld his order preventing The New York Times from publishing documents prepared by a lawyer for the conservative group Project Veritas, in a move that alarmed First Amendment advocates concerned about judicial intrusion into journalistic practices.

In a ruling made public on Friday, the judge, Justice Charles D. Wood of State Supreme Court in Westchester County, went further: He ordered The Times to immediately turn over any physical copies of the Project Veritas documents in question, and to destroy any electronic copies in the newspaper’s possession.

The Times said it would seek a stay of the ruling and was planning to appeal it.

“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,” the publisher of The Times, A.G. Sulzberger, said in a statement on Friday. “In defiance of law settled in the Pentagon Papers case, this judge has barred The Times from publishing information about a prominent and influential organization that was obtained legally in the ordinary course of reporting.”

  

Well, MY alarms have been raised. This is indeed frightening.

The judge’s order came about as part of a libel lawsuit filed in 2020 by Project Veritas, which is led by the provocateur James O’Keefe, that accused The Times of defamation.

The Justice Department is investigating Project Veritas for its possible role in the theft of a diary that belonged to Ashley Biden, President Biden’s daughter. The Times, in reporting on the investigation, published an article in November that quoted memos prepared by a lawyer for Project Veritas, which expounded on strategies that would allow the group to engage in deceptive reporting practices without breaking federal law.

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“The Times is perfectly free to investigate, uncover, research, interview, photograph, record, report, publish, opine, expose or ignore whatever aspects of Project Veritas its editors in their sole discretion deem newsworthy, without utilizing Project Veritas’s attorney-client privileged memoranda,” the judge wrote.

Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer who represents media outlets including CNN, said in an interview on Friday that the judge’s ruling was “way off base and dangerous.”

“It’s an egregious, unprecedented intrusion on news gathering and the news gathering process,” Mr. Boutrous said. “The special danger is it allows a party suing a news organization for defamation to then get a gag order against the news organization banning any additional reporting. It’s the ultimate chilling effect.”

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In his new ruling, Justice Wood rejected the argument by The Times that the memos prepared by Project Veritas’s lawyer — which advised the conservative group on how to legally carry out deceptive reporting methods — were a matter of public concern.

What the everloving fuck? Of COURSE it's a matter of public concern. It concerns deceiving the public!

[L]awyers for The Times wrote on Dec. 3 that the memos had been obtained through traditional reporting, not as part of formal litigation, and therefore could not be prevented from being published. The paper argued that any attempt to prevent it from publishing its journalism was “an unconstitutional prior restraint” that is prohibited by decades of established First Amendment law. “This is not, as Project Veritas suggests, a run-of-the-mill discovery dispute,” The Times wrote in a brief. “The information published by The Times was obtained outside discovery by reporters doing their jobs. Project Veritas simply seeks to use this litigation to suppress unfavorable news coverage of its activities. That it cannot do.”

Apparently Judge Wood thinks it can.