What did Project Veritas publish from Ashley Biden’s diary and how did they verify it?
Executive summary
Project Veritas purchased physical pages and digital copies that sources say were Ashley Biden’s diary and says it conducted internal verification but ultimately decided not to publish the diary; Project Veritas also attempted to return the material to Biden’s lawyer and handed it to law enforcement [1]. Copies or photographs of diary pages were published by other conservative outlets in 2020, and later court documents and Ashley Biden’s letter to a judge were cited by fact-checkers as confirming the diary’s provenance even as debate continued about who first published specific excerpts [2] [3].
1. What Project Veritas acquired and what it says it did with it
Project Veritas says it was approached in fall 2020 by tipsters who delivered a physical diary, digital copies and photographs that they claimed belonged to Ashley Biden; PV says it paid for the material, took steps to corroborate authenticity, and then decided not to publish the diary, attempting instead to return it to Ashley Biden’s attorney and turning it over to law enforcement to be returned to its rightful owner [1] [4].
2. Did Project Veritas publish diary contents?
Project Veritas publicly states it withheld publication of the diary itself and did not publish the document as a full product of its reporting, even while images and transcriptions circulated online from other outlets; The National File, a right‑leaning blog, published what it said was a full copy of the diary in November 2020, not Project Veritas [1] [5] [3].
3. How Project Veritas described its verification process
PV’s public statement says it “took steps to corroborate the authenticity of the diary” and that internal verification included cross‑referencing entries with publicly known dates and events, but PV also acknowledged it could not—or chose not to—reach a publication decision after that review and opted to hand the material back to counsel or law enforcement [1] [4]. Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe later acknowledged in 2022 that the organization could not definitively confirm the diary’s ownership at that time [2].
4. What independent reporting and court records later showed
Prosecutors in Florida established that two people stole the diary from a Delray Beach residence and sold it; Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport stolen property and court testimony indicated Project Veritas paid $40,000 for the diary and related items [3] [4] [2]. In 2024 Snopes and other fact‑checkers said Ashley Biden’s letter to the judge in Harris’s sentencing helped authenticate that the words published online were hers, prompting updates in prior verification judgments [2] [6].
5. Where the record remains contested and why it matters
Disputes persist over who published which pages and whether Project Veritas’ verification was sufficient: conservative outlets and commentators argue that PV’s handling showed suppression by other media, while fact‑checkers note PV did not itself publish the diary and that third parties circulated photographs and transcriptions earlier [4] [3]. Reporting shows a chain of custody problem—the diary was stolen and sold—which complicates standards of newsroom practice and legal exposure for publishers; Project Veritas’ public account of corroboration is limited to its statements and internal decisions, leaving independent confirmation of their verification methods incomplete in the public record [1] [4].
6. The current evidentiary posture and limits of public reporting
Fact‑checkers and major outlets now cite Ashley Biden’s court filings and guilty pleas in the theft case as tying the diary to her and confirming that material from the diary was authentic in authorial terms, but the detailed forensic steps Project Veritas used and why it declined to publish remain documented mainly in PV’s own statements; available public reporting does not provide independent, line‑by‑line forensic verification produced by Project Veritas for external review [2] [1] [3].