Condemning “Government Thuggery”: Paul Calli Quoted by Just The News
News website Just The News recently quoted Paul Calli in its article ‘Intimidate, humiliate, and embarrass’: Growing outcry against DOJ strong-arming of Biden critics (July 14, 2022).
Just The News writes:
The government is investigating whether Project Veritas stole a diary belonging to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s 40-year-old daughter, Ashley Biden. According to O’Keefe and others knowledgeable about the situation, Biden left behind the diary along with other belongings when she moved out of a Delray Beach, Fla. house subsequently occupied by a source who gave the diary to Project Veritas.
Journalists are legally protected by the First Amendment for receiving materials from sources — regardless of how the sources obtained the materials themselves before handing them over to the media.
“These raids are executed by prosecutors and agents to intimidate, humiliate, and embarrass the victim of the government’s thuggery and the victim’s family, friends, and colleagues,” said O’Keefe’s lawyer, Paul Calli.
Calli decried how in the case of O’Keefe and others prosecutors “desperately try to keep sealed, as long as possible if not forever, what they secretly submit to the judge in an effort to obtain search warrants.”
In other words, a prosecutor “can write anything she wishes to convince the court to sign the warrant,” he explained, “and the judge reviewing it has to assume the prosecutor is telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Sadly, that is not always the case, and thus it is really the prosecutor who secretly controls the basis on which a warrant is issued.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press have asked a federal judge to unseal the warrants used to raid O’Keefe’s home. The government has fought to keep them sealed.
Calli also criticized prosecutors and federal agents who “routinely leak information” to journalists “as to when the warrant will be served and the nature of the investigation, so the cameras are rolling for the humiliation.”
In December and March, the New York Times published several reports revealing details of the government’s sweeping probe targeting O’Keefe and Project Veritas. Critics have suggested the FBI and Justice Department leaked details of their probe to the Times in an unethical way.
Calli chastised journalists who are in coordination with federal law enforcement and “able to double-down on the harassment and intimidation by contacting the victim of the government thuggery during or immediately after the raid seeking comment.”
