Project Veritas says the DOJ secretly accessed its emails as part of its probe into how it got Joe Biden's daughter's diary

• Project Veritas says the Justice Department filed secret subpoenas to get emails from one of its employees.
• It should have disclosed them in a separate review of material taken via search warrants from the group, lawyers for Project Veritas said.

Lawyers for the conservative group Project Veritas claim that the Department of Justice secretly obtained emails of its employees — and went around a federal judge's back to do so.

The allegations were made in a court filing Tuesday as part of a larger battle against the Justice Department. In November, FBI agents searched an apartment owned by Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe, seeking evidence for their investigation into the theft of a diary owned by President Joe Biden's daughter, Ashley Biden.

Project Veritas has fought the search warrants in court, saying that the seizure of O'Keefe's phone "imperils a large amount of attorney-client privileged material, First Amendment-protected material, as well as confidential donor information."

Judge Analisa Torres, who's overseeing the case, appointed what's called a "special master" to review all the material seized through the FBI's warrants and decide what the Justice Department is permitted to review, and what material is privileged.

Project Veritas, which describes itself as a journalism organization, obtained a copy of Ashley Biden's diary ahead of the 2020 election but elected not to publish it, lawyers for the group said in court filings. The group often runs sting operations where operatives misrepresent themselves in order to obtain footage of Democrats, journalists, and employees of liberal groups disclosing embarrassing information. Prosecutors have said in court filings that, regardless, conduct related to stolen property is not protected under the law.

"There is no First Amendment protection for the theft and interstate transport of stolen property, and as such no related privilege attaches to materials responsive to the search warrants," prosecutors wrote in November.

In Tuesday's filing, lawyers for Project Veritas said that the Justice Department essentially circumvented the special master process by issuing secret subpoenas to Microsoft for the emails of Project Veritas employees. Many of the subpoenas included as exhibits in the filing include gag orders, which forbade Microsoft from disclosing their existence.

"It appears that the government misled this court by omission, failing to disclose during the briefing and arguments over the appointment of a special master that the government had already obtained through these surreptitious actions many of the privileged communications this court charged the special master with protecting," lawyers for the group wrote.

The warrants allowed prosecutors to obtain all messages from an email account belonging to an unnamed Project Veritas employee between January 1, 2020 and January 26, 2021. They cover "evidence of communications regarding or in furtherance of the subject offenses, such as communications with or regarding Ashley Biden, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (and representatives thereof), and/or Ashley Biden's associates regarding her stolen property." Lawyers for Project Veritas say that the group was unaware of the diary's existence until much later in 2020.

"The government had to know that nothing material could be learned by obtaining journalists' communications from months after the Ashley Biden diary and her belongings were in the hands of the local police," they wrote in the filing.

A representative for the US Attorney's office in Manhattan declined to comment.