The woman who stole a diary belonging to President Joe Biden’s daughter and sold it to the conservative group Project Veritas has been sentenced to a month behind bars.
Aimee Harris also received a sentence of three months of home confinement at a hearing in a Manhattan courtroom, according to Fox News.
In August 2022, Harris pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge after admitting she took Ashley Biden’s diary from a Delray Beach, Florida, home where Biden had temporarily lived and where her personal items remained.
At the sentencing, according to Fox, U.S. Attorney Robert Sobelman said Harris had taken a digital storage card, books, clothing, luggage and “everything she could get her hands on” belonging to Ashley Biden, so Harris “could make as much money as she could.”
The diary contained entries that reflected badly on Joe Biden.
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“She wanted to damage Ms. Biden’s father,” he said.
Judge Laura Taylor Swain called Harris’s actions “despicable and serious,” in trying to make money and also impact the 2020 presidential election.
“I do not believe I am above the law,” Harris said after prosecutors wanted her imprisoned for her failure to appear in court for sentencing multiple times.
“I’m a survivor of long-term domestic abuse and sexual trauma,” she said, according to Fox, noting that she also is caring for her two children, aged 8 and 6.
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However, Swain said Harris “made promises to the court with no intention of keeping them.”
Prosecutors said Harris had “repeatedly and consistently engaged in tactics to improperly delay this proceeding,” court records said, according to The New York Times.
Swain had threatened Harris with arrest if she did not appear.
In one request to delay sentencing attorneys for Harris said she was “sick, has no childcare and cannot appear tomorrow,” according to The Washington Post.
Court records said the claim about a lack of child care was later found to be false.
“The defendant has repeatedly and consistently engaged in tactics to improperly delay this proceeding, including by misleading the Court with false information to justify belated and unmerited requests for adjournments, refusing to appear when directed and failing to comply with court orders to disclose or produce certain information,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote in a filing, according to the Post.
“Through this pattern of behavior, the defendant has shown a complete disregard for the Court’s orders and for the orderly administration of this judicial proceeding,
“The defendant’s flagrant disrespect for the law, including the orders of this Court — even after pleading guilty in this case — demonstrates an abdication of responsibility for her conduct and strongly militates for an incarceratory sentence.”
Harris is expected to report to serve her sentence at a federal prison in Florida in July, Fox reported.
