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Fact Check: Posts Claim Contents of 'Ashley Biden's Diary' Have Been Verified. Here Are the Facts
Note: On April 29, 2024, Snopes changed the rating of this fact check from "Unproven" to "True" based on testimony provided by Ashley Biden. In an April 8 letter to a New York judge requesting jail time for one of the two people convicted of stealing her diary, Biden wrote "I will forever have to deal with the fact that my personal journal can be viewed online."
Previous versions of this fact check noted "strong evidence" that the diary existed, but argued that no source had authenticated the contents of the pages published online, writing that "the authenticity of photographs purported to be from a diary is a separate question from the factual existence of a diary."
Ashley Biden's letter to the court, in Snopes' view, provides that authentication.
Since 2023, various right-leaning accounts on X (formerly Twitter) have shared an old video containing audio of a phone call between Ashley Biden, the daughter of U.S. President Joe Biden, and operatives of Project Veritas — a political
organization that claims to practice journalism.
As Snopes discussed in detail in March 2023, that phone call is part of a suite of evidence that suggests Project Veritas came into possession of a diary that authentically belonged to Ashley Biden. Project Veritas, nevertheless, withheld
publication of the document.
Instead, a month before the November 2020 U.S. presidential election, a right-wing blog named The National File published what it claimed was "a copy of the complete diary of Ashley Blazer Biden, the 39-year-old daughter of Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, dating from during the 2020 presidential campaign."
An often cited page from that "leaked diary," which chronicled its author's addiction recovery in intimate detail, makes reference to sexual trauma and poses questions in search of an explanation for being "hyper-sexualized @ a young age." Along with mentions of not liking to visit a certain family's house, "being sexualized" with a female friend, and "having sex with friends @ a young age," the author noted taking "showers with my dad (probably not appropriate)."
Legal proceedings that occurred later make it clear that the National File
document came from Project Veritas. The Intercept reported in September 2022 that a Project Veritas employee provided the alleged diary to the National File in October 2020, when Project Veritas had reservations about publishing it.
Project Veritas, court testimony indicates, paid $40,000 for this alleged diary. As reported by The Associated Press in August 2022, the document had come into the possession of two people after one moved into an apartment previously occupied by Ashley Biden:
Fact Check: Posts Claim Contents of 'Ashley Biden's Diary' Have Been Verified.