A shadowy conservative media organisation reportedly threatened president Joe Biden into granting the group an interview using a stolen diary belonging to his daughter, Ashley Biden.

       According to a report in The New York Times, current and former members of the group known as Project Veritas have drawn scrutiny from federal investigators and prosecutors who are looking into how it came to purchase Ms Biden’s diary in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.

       Project Veritas and its founder, provocateur and self-described journalist James O’Keefe have denied that anyone associated with the group did anything wrong with the diary, which the group obtained in September 2020.

       Last month, federal agents executed search warrants at home belonging to Mr O’Keefe and several other Project Veritas associates. In documents filed with courts since those raids, the group says it did not publish the diary last October because, in Mr O’Keefe’s telling, publishing it would be “characterised as a cheap shot”.

       Yet at the same time, the group was using the same diary to demand that Mr Biden, then a candidate for president, sit for an on-camera interview with the group.

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       In a 16 October letter to Mr Biden, Project Veritas chief legal officer Jered Ede wrote that the group would “act unilaterally” if they did not hear from him within four days.

       Mr Ede also said his group reserved the right to “disclose that you [Mr Biden] refused our offer to provide answers to the questions raised by your daughter”.

       According to the Times, an attorney for Ms Biden, Roberta Kaplan, responded that the letter was “insane” and suggested that she “should” alert prosecutors in the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.

       Ms Biden’s attorneys did, in fact, alert prosecutors to the matter.

       The probe into Project Veritas’ acquisition of Ms Biden’s diary is not the first brush Mr O’Keefe has had with federal law enforcement.

       In 2010, he was sentenced to three years of probation after pleading guilty to entering a federal building — the district office of then-senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana — under false pretences for entering the office with a digital recording device, while accompanying a pair of conservative activists who were dressed as telephone repairmen.