A few years before she was nominated by Joe Biden to a lifetime judicial appointment, Judge Sarah Netburn signed off on an order that compelled Google to secretly hand over to criminal investigators information from the email account of the journalist who had obtained Ashley Biden’s diary.
Netburn has been eviscerated by Republican senators for alleged partisanship during her confirmation hearings this week, chiefly for allowing a repeat sexual offender to be housed in a female prison because he said he was a woman. Senators including Texas’ Ted Cruz have accused her of putting ideology over jurisprudence.
Unmentioned, however, have been her actions in 2020. Netburn as a federal magistrate judge in New York signed the order compelling Google to provide information from a Project Veritas journalist’s personal email account, court records show. Project Veritas purchased the diary after a woman said she found it when she moved into a room previously occupied by Ashley Biden.
The conservative-leaning journalism outfit ultimately decided not to publish the diary. Nonetheless, lawyers for Ashley Biden contacted the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which turned the missing diary into a federal case.
The contents of the diary, in which the president’s daughter discusses drug addiction and questions whether her sexual compulsion stemmed from Joe Biden allegedly showering with her as a child, had the potential to be politically explosive.
Netburn granted the ruling favorably to Ashley Biden, in spite of First Amendment implications, in December 2020, after Joe Biden had won the presidential election but while Donald Trump was still in office. Three and a half years later, Joe Biden nominated Netburn for a lifetime appointment to the position of District Judge for the Southern District of New York.
