By Kris Hermes
On January 13, 2017, a week before Donald Trump was set to be inaugurated as the 45th US president, law enforcement officers from the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington, DC, sat down with three Project Veritas operatives and their lawyer, Benjamin Barr, to discuss their infiltration of a number of public planning meetings for Inauguration Day protests. A newly uncovered document from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirms the January 13 meeting and the relationship that law enforcement had with the widely discredited alt-right disinformation group. The FBI document, referred to as a “302,” was obtained through discovery in 2018, but never disclosed publicly until now. The 302 details discussions law enforcement had with Project Veritas and the information-sharing they engaged in.
A hard drive of video footage taken with hidden button-cameras that Project Veritas provided to law enforcement, including the FBI and the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), would be at the center of a lengthy legal case, and the source of significant controversy that continues today.
Project Veritas actually met with law enforcement at least twice in advance of the inauguration and provided video footage to the FBI and MPD, pointing to a working relationship or collaboration with the far-right group. Instead of being transparent about the source of the video footage, police and prosecutors hid that relationship and then lied about it to the grand jury, DC Superior Court, and defense counsel, in a legal case brought against people protesting Trump’s first inauguration.
The US Attorney’s Office (USAO) in Washington, DC, used the Project Veritas footage as key evidence to indict and prosecute more than 200 activists for numerous felonies including conspiracy to riot and property destruction, all of which could have resulted in decades behind bars. For its part, the USAO kept the existence of the FBI 302 document and the January 13 meeting with Project Veritas secret for more than 16 months, long after the first trial had concluded.
The only reason all of this has come to light over the past year is because the lead prosecutor, former DC Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens, was charged with misconduct by the DC Bar for concealing and altering the Project Veritas video footage, which was central to their conspiracy prosecution.
