When President Harry Truman wanted to protect his daughter Margaret from criticism, he wrote a scathing letter to the Washington Post’s music critic, who had panned Margaret’s singing performance. “Some day I hope to meet you,” the president wrote, “When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”

That’s positively dainty compared to what President Joe Biden has done in an apparent effort to protect his daughter Ashley from criticism. His Department of Justice sent the FBI to raid the homes of Project Veritas journalists who had obtained her diary. Federal agents stormed in with a battering ram and handcuffs and seized electronic devices. Then somebody leaked the contents of those devices to the New York Times, which almost immediately published privileged attorney-client communications stored on a phone.

The government’s search warrants revealed that the FBI was rifling through the possessions of the journalists as part of an investigation into a supposed conspiracy to transport “stolen property” across state lines. But no evidence has emerged to show that Ashley Biden’s diary was stolen.

Before the 2020 election, Project Veritas bought the diary from a man and woman who said it had been left behind in a house in Florida where Ashley Biden had recently been staying. Project Veritas attempted to verify if the diary was authentic, couldn’t, and didn’t publish it. They turned it over to law enforcement.

Why did the FBI show up at the homes of Project Veritas journalists a year later and execute its terrifying raids? Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe said ten FBI agents banged on the door of his home in Westchester County, New York, in the pre-dawn hours. “They turned me around, handcuffed me, and threw me against the hallway,” he said. “I was partially clothed in front of my neighbors. They confiscated my phone. They raided my apartment.” The homes of two other Project Veritas journalists had been similarly raided a week earlier.

As bad as this story was already, it just got worse. Microsoft recently informed O’Keefe that the government had forced the company to turn over the internal communications of Project Veritas. The organization used Microsoft’s servers for email.

The secret subpoenas, search warrants and court orders began in late 2020. The U.S. government also imposed gag orders that prohibited Microsoft from telling its client that this was happening.

According to the New York Times, Microsoft lawyers initially pushed back on the subpoenas and warrants when they were served with them in late 2020 and early 2021. The government wouldn’t back down. Microsoft then handed over “voluminous materials” for eight Project Veritas employees, including O’Keefe, in absolute secrecy.

Then in November, the raids, followed almost immediately by the publication in the New York Times of the details of the raids and verbatim communications from the confiscated devices.

The raids revealed a massive federal investigation into the “theft” of Ashley Biden’s diary and confirmed, for the first time, that the diary was authentic.

With the investigation now public, Microsoft sought to have the gag orders lifted, but the Justice Department refused. Microsoft’s attorneys threatened a lawsuit. Only then did the government agree to lift the gag orders.

That’s when Microsoft revealed the surveillance to Project Veritas.

In a new court filing, Project Veritas asked a judge to prevent the government from using the information it had received from Microsoft. The group said the surveillance was overly broad and had begun eight months before the diary was even in the picture.

Now, a short review of your rights in United States of America.

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech and of the press from abridgment by the government.

The Fourth Amendment states, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

So the seizure of a journalist’s cell phone containing all his “papers and effects,” including the identities of confidential sources and privileged attorney-client communications, is an extremely serious violation of fundamental constitutional rights, with particularly grave implications for freedom of the press. And this is not a national security investigation into the theft of nuclear secrets. It’s an investigation into the transportation across state lines of the president’s daughter’s diary.

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The Justice Department has special guidelines that are supposed to protect the First Amendment rights of journalists from exactly this kind of government snooping into their work. To get around the guidelines, the Biden Justice Department contends that what Project Veritas does is not journalism.

More likely, the Biden administration is terrified that what Project Veritas does is definitively journalism. Given that the government’s secret surveillance of the group reached back eight months before Project Veritas pursued the diary, it’s possible that the diary is a pretext, a misdirection from the real objective of the snooping searches: finding out who has been talking to Project Veritas, and what they have said.

The difference between journalism and public relations is that one is the craft of digging out the truth and reporting it, while the other is the practice of hyping the client’s image and suppressing unfavorable stories.

Judge for yourself who’s a journalist and who’s a flack. Just remember that being on a president’s “enemies list” was once considered a badge of honor in the news business.

Write Susan at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley.