What did the court filings authored by Ashley Biden state about the diary's origin and contents?
Executive summary
Court filings and an unsealed letter submitted by Ashley Biden to the federal court say the physical journal was hers, that she had left it among belongings stored at a friend’s Delray Beach, Florida, home in spring 2020, and that it was later stolen and sold to outside parties; those filings and associated reporting do not provide independent verification of the specific passages published online and make clear the contents published by third parties remain unverified [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. What Ashley Biden’s court letter said about ownership and loss
In an unsealed letter to the court, Ashley Biden explicitly stated the journal was her personal property and described the emotional damage caused by its theft and publication, asking the judge to consider the harm when sentencing a defendant who admitted stealing and selling the items; reporting of that letter has been used by fact-checkers to treat her authorship as an authentication of ownership, not as a forensic verification of every page published online [2] [1].
2. Where the diary came from, according to prosecutors’ filings
Prosecutors’ filings in the case describe a sequence in which Ashley Biden was moving out of a friend’s residence in Delray Beach in spring 2020 and left behind multiple personal items—among them a handwritten journal, photographs and electronics—which a later occupant of the property took and then conspired to sell; those filings anchor the chain-of-custody allegations that underpin the criminal case against the two Florida residents who pleaded guilty [1] [3] [5].
3. How the diary reached media outlets, per court records and reporting
Court documents and contemporaneous reporting trace the hand-off from the Florida sellers to conservative media actors: two Florida defendants admitted transporting stolen property across state lines and selling material to Project Veritas operatives and affiliates, and reporting indicates at least one outlet, the National File, published what it said were diary pages in October–November 2020 while Project Veritas declined to publish because of authentication concerns; testimony and reporting have cited payments for the material and ensuing subpoenas and searches tied to Project Veritas’ involvement [6] [7] [8].
4. What the filings did not claim about the diary’s contents
The filings and Ashley Biden’s letter establish ownership and describe the theft and distribution, but they do not provide a court-adopted, forensic verification of the diary’s every entry or endorse the accuracy of specific passages circulated online; multiple fact-checkers and news stories note that publishing of certain pages was carried out by third parties and has not been legally certified as verbatim or contextually accurate by investigators or the court record [4] [1] [5].
5. How courts treated related claims and privilege assertions
Judicial rulings in related litigation rejected some First Amendment and reporter’s-privilege arguments from Project Veritas, in part because admissions by two sellers that they stole the items undercut claims that the material was lawfully obtained; that fight over privilege and seized devices arose from the same alleged chain of events that the filings describe, reinforcing that the documents’ provenance—who possessed and moved the journal—is central to the legal record even as content verification remains outside the court’s scope [9] [8].
6. Competing narratives and limits of the record
Conservative actors who acquired or published the pages have argued the diary’s contents were politically relevant, while Project Veritas’ public statements say their own inability to authenticate the journal led them to withhold publication; fact-checkers and mainstream outlets emphasize that the court filings authenticate ownership and the theft, but they also stress that authenticity of specific published passages was not independently proven in the filings themselves [6] [4] [10].
Conclusion: what the filings establish—and what they leave open
The court filings and Ashley Biden’s letter establish a clear factual frame: the physical journal belonged to her, it was left among belongings in a Delray Beach home during a move in spring 2020, and it was stolen and sold to outside actors who then provided or sold copies to conservative media; those records do not, however, constitute a forensic or judicial validation of the accuracy of every line that has circulated online, a distinction repeatedly highlighted by fact-checkers and reporting [1] [2] [4] [5].