What did court testimony and prosecutors say about the authenticity of Ashley Biden’s diary?
Executive summary
Court filings and unsealed testimony established that Ashley Biden kept a personal diary that was stolen and later sold, and prosecutors and the victim herself treated the journal as authentic in criminal proceedings — a point Snopes and multiple outlets have cited in revising earlier uncertainty — while questions remain about the public interpretation of specific published excerpts and who first verified the photographed pages [1] [2] [3].
1. What the court record says: a stolen diary, guilty pleas, and victim testimony
Federal court documents and guilty pleas in the Manhattan prosecution make clear that personal items belonging to Ashley Biden, including a diary, were taken from a Florida residence and sold to people linked to Project Veritas, and one defendant admitted guilt to conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines [4] [5]; Ashley Biden then submitted a letter to the court describing the pain caused by the theft and explicitly treating the journal and its contents as her private writings, a filing that fact-checkers later cited as authentication [5] [1].
2. How prosecutors framed authenticity and motive
Prosecutors in sentencing filings and public statements treated the diary as a real item that had been trafficked for political purposes, arguing that the theft and sale were intended to harm Joe Biden politically and noting the financial transactions connected to Project Veritas, which court papers indicate paid for the material [5] [1]; sentences and forfeiture orders reflected that framing, with a defendant ordered to forfeit proceeds received for selling the stolen diary [5].
3. Fact-checkers: shifting from “unproven” to “true” based on court materials
Major fact-checkers such as Snopes reversed an earlier “unproven” rating and concluded the diary’s existence and the basic authenticity of the pages published online had been confirmed after Ashley Biden’s court letter and related filings were made public, a change explicitly grounded in those court documents rather than independent forensic verification of each scanned page [1] [2].
4. Remaining caveats: existence vs. provenance of published excerpts
Both reporting and the fact checks emphasize a critical distinction: the legal record confirms a diary belonging to Ashley Biden was stolen and sold, and Ashley herself acknowledged the diary’s personal nature in court papers, but that does not equate to independent forensic authentication of every photograph or excerpt circulated online — earlier versions of the fact checks and some coverage flagged that the provenance and exact chain of custody for the published facsimiles were separate questions [1] [3].
5. The role of Project Veritas and competing narratives about verification
Court materials and reporting indicate Project Veritas acquired the diary for a sum reported in court testimony and by news outlets, yet Project Veritas did not ultimately publish the diary; another right‑wing outlet posted pages before the 2020 election, and conservative commentators seized on fact‑checker reversals to argue a political bias in verification, a contention reporters noted even as Snopes cited the court filing as decisive [1] [5] [3].
6. What prosecutors declined or could not prove publicly
While prosecutors pursued the theft and described the diary’s sale and political motive, public court filings do not present a line-by-line forensic certification of the text as published online, and reporting warns that the diary’s contents have been “distorted and manipulated” in public circulation — a claim Ashley Biden made in court filings and coverage — underscoring limits in what the criminal record itself definitively proves about the context and interpretation of specific passages [3] [5].