provide answers to the questions raised by your daughter. in response, lawyers working for ashley biden accused project veritas of threatening them as part of an extortion effort. ms. biden s lawyers told mr. ede of project veritas that project veritas should treat this diary as stolen property. the lawyer suggested that serious crimes might have been committed. ultimately one of ashley biden s lawyers, roberta kaplan, told mr. ede, quote, this is insane. we should send sdny, meaning federal prosecutors in the southern district of new york. shortly thereafter, ms. biden s lawyers in fact alerted prosecutors at the united states attorney s office at the southern district of new york which is the federal prosecutor s office that is now overseeing this case. you know, nixon went for the guy s medical records from his
him at the edged of my interview, listen, mike, we ll need you back here again when we finally understand what all of these weird pieces mean and what is going on here because this is a freak show of a story. well, now we ve got the rest of it, or at least most of the rest of it. check this out. this is adam goldman and michael schmidt writing today. in the final two months of the 2020 campaign, president donald j. trump, his grip on power slipping because of his handling of the pandemic, desperately tried to change the narrative by attacking joe biden s son, hunter, invoking his name publicly over 100 names. at the same time another effort was under way to expose the contents of a diary kept the previous year by mr. biden s daughter, ashley. now more than a year later, the justice department is deep into an investigation of how ashley biden s diary found its way into
potential legal implications here. i mean it does read in the excerpts that you have published of the back and forth in these lawyer letters, it does read like an extortion attempt, like essentially trying to force biden into doing an interview with a group that maintains its journalistic outfit, trying to force him to do it by all but explicit threat that his daughter s diary would end up being publicly disclosed if he didn t do it. i mean extorting a public figure like that in that way has legal implications. before we sort of get to the legalness of it, though, i think we have to talk about the personalness of it. ashley biden was not someone who had a major public role in the campaign. she wasn t going to work for her father. she was not out there really pushing you know, on the campaign trail. she occasionally did appear. and this was her personal diary.
veritas. the friend of ms. harris here is an ex-convict who spent years in prison for a major money laundering scheme. project veritas has acknowledged buying ashley biden s diary, but in october, less than a month before the election, the group decided they would not publish a story based on it. that said, quote, project veritas was still trying to use the diary as leverage. get this, on october 16th, 2020, project veritas wrote to joe biden and its campaign that it had obtained ashley biden s diary and wanted to question mr. biden on camera about its contents. project veritas chief legal officer, jared t. e dechlt e wrote shall we not hear from you, we shall reserve the right that you refused our offer to
here we ve descended even from there to the personal diary of the daughter of the president. and now it is literally a federal criminal investigation. how is this real? how is this not bad fiction? joining us now is michael schmidt, washington correspondent for the new york times who initially broke the story for the new york times lat month and is fficially here on this scoop. mr. schmidt thank you for making time for being here tonight. thanks for having me. did i screw any of this up or have i missed anything important that helps us understand this no. i think you were as you were going in the back and forth about the letters that were exchanged by project veritas and the biden lawyers, i could hear it in your voice. that was a really, really important time. this was a very, very close election.