Criminal prosecutors are expected to get their hands on nearly 1,000 documents related to the alleged theft of the diary of Ashley Biden, the only child of President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden, after a judge rejected the conservative group Project Veritas's First Amendment claim.

Project Veritas’s attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, said Monday that the group is considering appealing the ruling, according to a report from The Associated Press. The organization has until January 5 to turn over the material.

The documents stem from November 2021 FBI raids on the homes of the organization’s founder, James O’Keefe, and two of his associates. Federal agents ultimately seized 47 cell phones, computers, memory sticks, and other electronic devices, according to a report from New York Magazine. O’Keefe left the organization last February following a management dispute.

Since the raid, O'Keefe has maintained that the FBI investigation into Project Veritas’s activities—which he argues were legitimate attempts at newsgathering violates the First Amendment. In this effort, he’s drawn support from the American Civil Liberties Union, which warned after the raid that, despite Project Veritas’s well-documented “disgraceful deceptions,” the “precedent set in this case could have serious consequences for press freedom.”

In its written arguments before Judge Analisa Torres, lawyers for Project Veritas and O’Keefe argued the investigation “seems undertaken not to vindicate any real interests of justice, but rather to stifle the press from investigating the President’s family.”

Torres ruled that Project Veritas’s First Amendment arguments were “inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent” and that the group’s claim to be protecting the identities of a confidential source was voided by the fact that both people who sold the diary to the group pled guilty in August 2022.

In their guilty plea for conspiring to traffic in stolen goods, Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander—both of whom are currently awaiting sentencing—admitted they stole Biden’s diary from a house in Florida and sold it to Project Veritas for $40,000, hoping to embarrass the then-presidential candidate as he challenged former President Donald Trump. (Before he was elected, Trump was a donor to the organization.)

Project Veritas has admitted it paid Harris and Kurlander, but O’Keefe has said the group did not publish any information from the diary after it could not confirm its authenticity.

The court ruling comes two weeks after Hannah Giles, O’Keefe’s replacement as CEO, announced on social media that she was quitting, saying she had “stepped into an unsalvageable mess — one wrought with strong evidence of past illegality and post-financial improprieties.” Giles added that she had brought evidence of illegal behavior to “the appropriate law enforcement authorities.”