What did fact‑checkers conclude about claims derived from Ashley Biden's diary?
Executive summary
Fact‑checking organizations initially treated the leaked pages attributed to Ashley Biden’s journal as unproven or lacking independent authentication, but at least one prominent fact‑checker—Snopes—revised its verdict to “True” after a letter from Ashley Biden filed in court was published and cited as authentication [1] [2]. Other news outlets and fact‑checkers cautioned that law‑enforcement or government officials never formally verified the diary’s contents, and that political actors and media outlets had amplified and weaponized the material during and after the 2020 campaign [3] [4].
1. How fact‑checkers moved from “unproven” to “confirmed”
Snopes originally rated claims about the diary’s contents as unproven because photographs and online pages could not be independently authenticated, distinguishing the existence of a diary from verification of specific excerpts; following the unsealing and publication of Ashley Biden’s letter to the court, Snopes concluded that the letter provided sufficient authentication and updated its rating to “True” [1] [2].
2. Why some outlets and fact‑checkers stopped short of full legal confirmation
Despite Snopes’s revision, several outlets and earlier fact‑checks emphasized that neither law enforcement nor government officials had formally confirmed the contents of the diary, and Newsweek reported that investigators and prosecutors did not themselves validate the published pages—an important caveat highlighting different evidentiary standards between journalistic verification and court filings [3] [5].
3. The role of theft, Project Veritas and downstream publishers in complicating verification
The backstory—Aimee Harris’s theft and sale of the notebook and the involvement of Project Veritas, which said it had material but declined to publish because it could not authenticate it—complicated public analysis and fueled disputes over provenance; a conservative outlet, the National File, later published digital pages it claimed were the diary, which further muddied the waters for fact‑checkers and the public [6] [3] [1].
4. FBI, courtroom filings and differing evidentiary thresholds
PolitiFact and reporting on the FBI’s plea announcement noted that the bureau did not confirm the diary’s contents in its public filings and that the DOJ announcement did not name Ashley Biden or verify passages, making clear that an investigative or prosecutorial acknowledgment of stolen property is not the same as authentication of contested textual claims [4]. Snopes’s change relied on Ashley Biden’s own court letter as evidentiary confirmation for the purposes of its fact‑check, a methodological choice that some critics and outlets flagged as a lower bar than an independent forensic authentication [1] [2] [3].
5. Political amplification, media criticism and the contested afterlife of the diary
Conservative commentators and right‑leaning outlets loudly highlighted Snopes’s flip and the diary excerpts—especially a passage stating “showers with my dad (probably not appropriate)”—to attack the Biden family and accuse mainstream media of coverups, while Ashley Biden herself and some outlets warned that the journal’s private reflections had been distorted and weaponized, underscoring that fact‑checking verdicts entered a politicized arena where interpretation and intent matter as much as provenance [7] [5] [1].
6. Bottom line for readers who want to separate claim from context
Fact‑checkers did not unanimously reach a single, unqualified conclusion: Snopes now treats the diary’s authorship and specific published passages as authenticated by Ashley Biden’s court letter and rates the claim as True, while other reporting and fact‑checks emphasize that neither the FBI nor other government officials independently confirmed the contents, and that the diary’s theft, selective publication, and political trafficking left substantial interpretive and ethical questions unresolved [2] [4] [3].