Ashley Biden Diary Thief Gets Month in Jail Plus Home Detention

(Bloomberg News/TNS) — The woman who stole the diary of President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley and sold it to a conservative group before the 2020 election was sentenced to a month behind bars and three months of home detention.

Aimee Harris, who pleaded guilty in August 2022 to stealing the diary and other property from a Florida home where Ashley Biden had stored them, was sentenced Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain in Manhattan. Swain also imposed three years of probation, which includes the home detention.

Harris admitted she was paid $20,000 for the diary by Project Veritas, the group founded by conservative activist James O’Keefe. She said she believed its contents would be made public in a way that would help President Donald Trump, who would go on to lose the election to Joe Biden.

Project Veritas never published the contents, but its role in the thefts has been the subject of a government investigation. In December, a federal judge ruled that documents relating to the theft, some of which were seized in a Federal Bureau of Investigation search of O’Keefe’s home, were not protected by the First Amendment. O’Keefe was forced out of Project Veritas last year.

Prosecutors had asked Swain to sentence Harris to four to 10 months of home incarceration, to be followed by three years of supervised release. 

Harris’s sentencing had been postponed numerous times after originally being scheduled for Dec. 6. 2022. Most recently she failed to show up for a sentencing hearing in New York, complaining she was ill and lacked child care. She dialed into an earlier court hearing from a Florida emergency room. 

Another Florida resident, Robert Kurlander, pleaded guilty to the theft along with Harris.

The case is U.S. v. Harris, 22-cr-00457, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).