Remember the saying “don’t make a federal case out of it”? Well, someone is making a federal case about Ashley Biden’s diary, and this entire situation is extremely weird.

Honestly, can anyone else recall when a missing diary occasioned an FBI search warrant?

Federal agents in New York conducted the court-ordered searches on Thursday — one in New York City and one in suburban Westchester County — targeting people who had worked with the group and its leader, James O’Keefe, according to two of the people briefed on the events. The investigation is being handled by F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors in Manhattan who work on public corruption matters, the people said.”

After this article was initially published online on Friday, Mr. O’Keefe put out a video confirming that current and former Project Veritas employees had their homes searched on Thursday.”

He said the group had recently received a grand jury subpoena and acknowledged that Project Veritas had been involved in discussions with sources about the diary. But he offered a lengthy defense of his group’s handling of the diary, saying that he and his colleagues had been operating as ethical journalists.”

Now, if your Spidey senses aren’t tingling when you read the words “Project Veritas” here, you might want to check your radar again. Especially because… Project Veritas never published the diary’s contents.

Project Veritas did not publish Ms. Biden’s diary, but dozens of handwritten pages from it were posted on a right wing website on Oct. 24, 2020, at a time when President Donald J. Trump was seeking to undermine Mr. Biden’s credibility by portraying his son, Hunter, as engaging in corrupt business dealings. The posting was largely ignored by other conservative outlets and the mainstream media.”

The website said it had obtained the diary from a whistle-blower who worked for a media organization that refused to publish a story about it before the election. It claimed to know where the actual diary was located and that the whistle-blower had an audio recording of Ms. Biden admitting it was hers.”

The bottom line is that, per the New York Times itself, Project Veritas could not authenticate the diary, and did not publish any stories about it. So, why is Project Veritas being raided by the FBI on the pretext of the missing diary?

“Project Veritas gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner. We never published it,” O’Keefe said. “Now, Ms. Biden’s father’s Department of Justice, specifically the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, appears to be investigating the situation, claiming the diary was stolen. We don’t know if it was but it begs the question: In what world is the alleged theft of a diary investigated by the President’s FBI and his Department of Justice? A diary?”

O’Keefe went on to claim the investigation “smacks of politics” but that Project Veritas will “not back down.”

Ashley Biden, who has led a less public and yet still troubled life, either lost the diary or had the diary stolen while in drug rehab. Those are the two conflicting stories about how it left her possession in 2019. According to John Hinderaker at Power Line, who looked at the diary’s contents, calls it “personal and highly embarrassing, obviously not meant for anyone else’s eyes” and that it contained no massive family skeletons. Either losing the diary or having it stolen could prove embarrassing for Ashley Biden, but hardly a matter worthy of the FBI’s time and attention… right? Or has this become standard operating procedure for a Biden family member when something goes wrong – call in federal authorities to fix it?

That question is the one that legal expert Jonathan Turley is asking.

The use of the FBI is also reminiscent of the still unexplained use of the FBI when Joe Biden was Vice President to search for a gun owned by Hunter Biden that was discarded behind a restaurant.”

Project Veritas decided not to run the story because it could not verify that the diary belonged to Biden. (The FBI may have just offered that confirmation). Instead, it alerted the police, according to O’Keefe: “Project Veritas gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner. We never published it.”

So why the raids? Since when does the FBI conducted raids over missing diaries?”

The FBI can cite the interstate elements of the alleged theft as raising a federal crime. However, what is the crime? It is not clear if they are suggesting that the responsible parties were seeking to sell the diary or that there was some national security element (which would be bizarre since Biden’s daughter was writing before her father ever became president).”

Turley points out five unanswered questions:

1. What was the context for the diary’s loss? (Did Ashley Biden leave the diary in a room or was it stolen?)
2. What is the alleged federal crime (and what is the precedent for a major federal investigation over such an alleged theft)?
3. What precautions were taken by the Biden Administration in light of the claimed media status of the targeted individuals?
4. Why was there a delay in this action being taken if the alleged theft occurred a year ago?
5. Has this matter been under investigation for a year and did the White House request the intervention of the FBI?

Those are all important questions, but the kicker really is question number five. Did the White House get involved when Ashley’s diary pages were published online – and not by Project Veritas – and direct the FBI to “take care of it”? And since Project Veritas did NOT publish the diary’s contents, and then turned over the material to law enforcement, why are they being investigated?

Or, to put it another way – was this a trap to see if Project Veritas would take some bait? Or, did the FBI just see this as a convenient pretext to do a little pre-emptive digging around Project Veritas, and possibly scare them off from aggressively embarrassing politically connected Democrat allies?

Either question is deeply unsettling, given the power of the federal government to reach in and investigate and upend people’s lives. Entrapment is not beyond the FBI. If the diary was set up to be used as bait, did Ashley Biden know about that? Or was she used as well? This is the kind of case that when one question gets posed, another two rise up to follow it.

But any way you cut it, a missing diary should not be a federal case, even if it is the president’s daughter. So what is really going on here? The fact that we might never know is also very troubling.

Featured image via picjumbo_com on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license