Two plead guilty to trafficking Ashley Biden's diary, property

Two Florida residents pleaded guilty on Thursday to conspiring to trafficking in stolen goods for selling a diary and other personal effects of President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley Biden, the Justice Department said.

The criminal charges are the first to emerge from a federal investigation into how, prior to the 2020 presidential election, the journal reached the conservative video outlet Project Veritas. The group has said it paid for rights to publish the diary, but never did so because it couldn’t authenticate it. Contents from the diary later emerged on a more obscure conservative site.

Last November, the FBI carried out search warrants at the home of the founder of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe, and those of two of his colleagues, in connection with the investigation. None of those individuals have been charged, but O’Keefe has denounced the raids as an attack on press freedom.

In a Manhattan federal court hearing on Thursday, Aimee Harris, 40, of Palm Beach and Robert Kurlander, 58, of Jupiter each pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy charge stemming from their involvement in selling the journal, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan said in a statement.

“Harris and Kurlander stole personal property from an immediate family member of a candidate for national political office,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. “They sold the property to an organization in New York for $40,000 and even returned to take more of the victim’s property when asked to do so. Harris and Kurlander sought to profit from their theft of another person’s personal property, and they now stand convicted of a federal felony as a result.”

The charging document filed on Thursday says that after Harris told Kurlander what she had discovered, he texted her that they could “make a SHIT TON of money” off of the journal. The pair tried to offer the diary to the Trump campaign, but an unidentified representative of the campaign turned them down and suggested they give the materials to the FBI.

“They want it to go to the FBI. There is NO WAY [Candidate-2] can use this. It has to be done a different way,” Kurlander texted to Harris, according to the filing.

Both defendants pleaded guilty as part of agreements with prosecutors. Kurlander has agreed to cooperate with investigators as part of his deal, Williams’ office said. Details of the plea agreement were not immediately available. Each defendant faces a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison, but defendants are typically sentenced under federal guidelines that usually call for a sentence well below the maximum. Harris and Kurlander have each agreed to forfeit their $20,000 share of the sum Project Veritas paid.

A White House spokesperson referred a request for comment on the charges to the Justice Department. A lawyer for Ashley Biden did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the developments.

O’Keefe has said his group was told that the diary and Ashley Biden’s other effects were abandoned by her when she left a Delray Beach, Fla., home where she’d been staying. The group eventually turned the materials over to police.

Justice Department officials have declined to comment on whether they treated Project Veritas as a media outlet and granted it protections that sharply limit investigations into news organizations. The conservative group, known for its video exposés, said it obtained records indicating the FBI considered it to be part of the media at the outset of the investigation.

The charging document filed on Thursday, known as a criminal information, describes Project Veritas solely as an “organization” located in Mamaroneck, N.Y. The information suggests that Project Veritas officials should have realized at a September 2020 meeting with the defendants in New York that the diary was stolen.

“Harris’s explanations to the Organization during this meeting confirmed for Kurlander that Harris had stolen the Victim’s property,” the court document says.

The status of the federal probe into Project Veritas is unclear. A lawyer for the group, Paul Calli, defended its actions in connection with the diary and suggested that charges against it or its personnel would be unwarranted.

“Project Veritas’s news gathering was ethical and legal,” Calli said in a statement. “A journalist’s lawful receipt of material later alleged to be stolen is routine, commonplace, and protected by the First Amendment.”

Ashley Biden, 41, is the president’s second daughter and his first with first lady Jill Biden. His first daughter, Naomi, died in a car accident in 1972 at age 13 months along with her mother, Neilia Biden.

Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.