The woman who admitted to stealing the diary of President Joe Biden’s daughter and selling it to Project Veritas weeks before the 2020 presidential election was sentenced Tuesday to one month in prison followed by three years of supervised release.
Aimee Harris, 41, was also ordered to forfeit the $20,000 she received in payment from the right-wing group by Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who called Harris’ actions “despicable,” according to the Associated Press. In handing down her sentence, Swain noted that Harris had first tried—and failed—to sell Biden’s possessions to Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign team.
Her aim was simple, as a prosecutor put it on Tuesday: “She wanted to damage Ms. Biden’s father.”
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Harris pleaded guilty in August 2022 to conspiring with Robert Kurlander, a friend, to transport Ashley Biden’s diary over state lines to New York, where she met with Project Veritas employees in September 2020. Kurlander, 60, also received $20,000 for the stolen diary. He pleaded guilty at the same time as Harris, but—unlike her—cooperated with the Justice Department as it investigated the matter. He is set to be sentenced in October.
Harris was visibly emotional as she was sentenced in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, the AP reported. She apologized to Ashley Biden, who left her diary—full of “highly personal entries” related to her recovery from drug addiction—at a friend’s residence in Delray Beach, Florida, where prosecutors said she’d believed they would be stored safely. Instead, Harris stumbled across them while staying at the property in the summer of 2020, along with books, luggage, and a digital storage card belonging to Biden.
Biden was not present in court on Tuesday, but her lawyer looked on from the spectator section. In a letter filed earlier this week, the president’s daughter called what happened to her as “one of the most heinous forms of bullying,” according to The New York Times.
Harris, a Palm Beach resident, begged Swain to sentence her to probation. “I’m a survivor of long term domestic abuse and sexual trauma,” she told the court, adding that she did not believe she was above the law, the AP reported.
Federal prosecutors asked the court this month to impose a sentence of between four and 10 months behind bars. “She wrongfully exploited her physical access to the intimate belongings of someone whom she did not know personally, but knew as a public figure whose property would fetch a handsome price tag,” they argued in a sentencing memorandum.
“Stealing personal belongings of a candidate’s family member, and selling them to an organization to exploit them for political gain, was wrong and illegal no matter the political agenda.”
Prosecutors previously pushed for her to receive a lighter punishment, amounting to six months of home confinement and several years of supervised release. But Harris missed a number of sentencing hearings, citing illness or childcare responsibilities. Prosecutors began to accuse her in filings of deliberately attempting to stave off sentencing and delay proceedings.
Harris was ordered to report to prison in July, a date tentatively set by Swain to coincide with when her children will be on summer vacation, according to Courthouse News. She declined to speak to reporters as she departed on Tuesday.
No one connected to Project Veritas, which all but imploded late last year, has been charged in connection with the diary theft. In December, a federal judge ruled that Justice Department investigators could access nearly 1,000 documents related to the case that were produced after the FBI raided the homes of three Project Veritas members, including founder James O’Keefe, in November 2021.
All three operatives have since left the organization, with O’Keefe resigning last February amid mounting complaints over his bad financial management and “outright cruel” conduct. The status of the federal investigation into Project Veritas remains unclear, according to the Times.
