Which specific Ashley Biden diary excerpts have been authenticated by reputable news organizations?
Executive summary
Reputable fact‑checkers and mainstream outlets that relied on them report that the diary pages circulating online were effectively authenticated in 2024 after Ashley Biden’s court filing, but they do not publish a catalog of individually authenticated excerpts; the verification is presented as a general confirmation of the diary’s content rather than a line‑by‑line endorsement [1] [2] [3]. Other actors in the story — notably Project Veritas and the right‑wing outlet that first posted the material — either declined to publish their copy or explicitly said they could not independently confirm provenance at the time [4] [1].
1. How “authentication” is being described by reputable fact‑checkers
Snopes revised an earlier “unproven” finding after receiving and reviewing court filings and testimony, concluding that Ashley Biden’s own letter to the court provided sufficient basis to treat the online pages as authentic in their reporting, but Snopes framed that as authentication of the pages’ origin rather than adjudication of every factual claim in the diary entries themselves [1] [5]. Major summaries of that change—picked up by outlets such as Newsweek and Yahoo News in May 2024—repeat Snopes’ line: the diary pages that had circulated online are now considered to have been authenticated insofar as they derive from Ashley Biden’s diary, while emphasizing that the meanings and implications of the entries remain subject to interpretation [3] [2].
2. No reputable outlet has published a vetted, excerpt‑by‑excerpt list
The public record compiled in these sources shows a notable gap: although Snopes and downstream outlets say the diary material has been authenticated based on court materials and testimony, none of those reports publishes a granular, excerpt‑level registry specifying which dated lines or passages have independent corroboration or forensic verification in the public domain [1] [2] [3]. The reporting thus supports a general conclusion about the diary’s provenance but stops short of offering a forensic transcript tied to independent witnesses or handwriting experts that would allow readers to point to a discrete set of “authenticated” excerpts.
3. What Project Veritas and early publishers said and did (and did not) verify
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe testified that his organization paid for a document and took steps to corroborate it, but PV ultimately said it could not confirm the diary it received belonged to Ashley Biden and chose not to publish the full document publicly; those internal actions and disclaimers were later part of court proceedings [4] [1]. A separate right‑wing blog, The National File, published what it claimed was a complete diary before the 2020 election, but that outlet is not characterized in the reviewed sources as providing independent, reputationally rigorous authentication [1] [2].
4. Criminal case context and why that matters to authentication claims
Two Florida residents who sold the document pleaded guilty in August 2022 to conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines, and court testimony established Project Veritas paid roughly $40,000 for the material — details that figure prominently in the public record and in Snopes’ reassessment because they document the chain of custody and the contested, criminalized path by which the pages reached the public sphere [1] [2] [6]. That criminal context explains both why sources like Snopes treat Ashley Biden’s court filing as authoritative for provenance and why some reporters remain cautious about saying specific passages were independently corroborated.
5. Bottom line: what can be said, and what cannot
Based on the available reporting, reputable fact‑checkers and mainstream outlets report that the diary pages circulating online are authentic to Ashley Biden’s diary as a document, a conclusion reached after court testimony and Biden’s own letter; however, no reputable news organization in the cited record has published a verified list of specific excerpts that were authenticated individually or validated by independent forensic analysis in the public domain [1] [2] [3]. Project Veritas’ own statements and the criminal pleas of the intermediaries complicate the provenance story and underscore why outlets stopped short of granular excerpt‑level certification [4] [6].