Ashley Biden speaks alongside her father, U.S. President Joe Biden, during a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, U.S., Tuesday, June 13, 2023.
Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A Florida woman who stole and then sold a diary and other items belonging to Ashley Biden — President Joe Biden’s daughter — to a right-wing media group weeks before the 2020 election was sentenced Tuesday to a month in prison. federal prison and three months in prison. house arrest.
Aimee Harris, 41, was also ordered to forfeit $20,000 and serve three years of probation at her sentencing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
Prosecutors had asked that Harris be sentenced by Judge Laura Taylor Swain to four to 10 months in prison, as federal sentencing guidelines recommend.
The Palm Beach resident, whose sentencing was postponed a dozen times at her request, in turn asked Swain to sentence her to probation, without jail time.
Harris pleaded guilty in August 2022 to conspiring with Robert Kurlander, 60, in September 2020 to steal Ashley’s belongings from a Delray, Fla., home where Ashley previously lived and transport them across state borders. State to sell them.
Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, which prosecuted Harris, declined to comment. Harris’ attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Harris, who temporarily stayed at the Delray residence after Ashley left it, discovered the diary, which contained “highly personal entries,” as well as a digital storage card that the president’s daughter had left behind , according to court records.
The provocative right-wing group Project Veritas then paid Harris and Kurlander, a Jupiter, Fla., resident, $20,000 each for the articles, according to court records.
Kurlander, who pleaded guilty at the same time as Harris, is currently scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 25 by Swain.
Harris’ conviction comes more than three months after a federal judge ruled that prosecutors could receive documents seized by the FBI with search warrants executed at the home of James O’Keefe, then CEO of Project Veritas, and two other members of the group in November 2021. as part of a criminal investigation into the theft of the newspaper.
Judge Analisa Torres ruled that prosecutors could seize documents in connection with those warrants that were not protected by attorney-client privilege.
Torres’ late December order says prosecutors say Harris and Kurlander were paid by Project Veritas to travel to New York to deliver Ashley Biden’s diary to the group.
“There, Harris allegedly revealed that the victim had additional items in the Florida residence and, ‘at the request of Project Veritas,’ she and Kurlander returned to Florida to retrieve them,” Torres wrote, citing prosecutors’ claims .
“The government alleges they stole additional items from the victim and gave them to a Project Veritas employee in Florida, who transported them to New York.”
Torres thus endorsed the conclusion of a so-called special master, appointed to review the documents, that Project Veritas and O’Keefe were not entitled to journalistic privilege in shielding the documents from the eyes of prosecutors.
An attorney for O’Keefe did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Neither O’Keefe nor anyone else connected to Project Veritas has been charged in connection with the newspaper.
O’Keefe, in a statement released after the FBI searches, said his organization was approached by people offering Biden’s diary, but that the group decided not to publish its contents and then gave the diary to law enforcement when Ashley’s lawyer refused. to accept it.
“Ultimately, we made the ethical decision that because, in part, we could not determine whether the journal was real, whether the journal actually belonged to Ashley Biden, or whether the contents of the journal had occurred “We couldn’t publish the paper or any part of it,” O’Keefe said at the time.
O’Keefe was removed as head of Project Veritas in February 2023.
cnbc
