An American woman who pleaded guilty to stealing and selling the diary of Joe Biden’s daughter while he was running for the US presidency reportedly received a one-month prison sentence after being sharply reprimanded by the judge.
“(These actions were) despicable and therefore very serious,” judge Laura Taylor Swain said without mincing words on Tuesday in New York federal court, according to what the BBC reported.
The accused Aimee Harris, 41, thus headed to prison where she will spend the next month before continuing her sentence at home for the next three months, the judge ruled, after she pleaded guilty to conspiracy aimed at transporting stolen goods across state lines in 2022.
Because in 2020, when Joe Biden announced his candidacy for the presidential race, his daughter Ashley Biden stayed with a friend in Delray Beach, Florida, where she allegedly kept a diary and other personal items on the premises. .
At the same time, the accused had obtained permission from the owner to stay on the premises and would have come across the item which she would have immediately tried to sell, with her accomplice Robert Kurlander, to the presidential campaign of her opponent, Donald Trump, according to BBC.
She would then have pitched the proposal to Project Veritas, an ultraconservative group known for its support of the Republican billionaire and for its media stunts involving the disclosure of personal data, which would have taken the bait, AFP previously reported.
In addition to the prison sentence, the forty-year-old from Palm Beach will be forced to forfeit the US$20,000 she would have pocketed from the sale of the newspaper, the judge ruled.
“Stealing the personal belongings of a candidate’s family member and selling them to an organization to exploit them for political purposes was wrong and illegal, regardless of the political agenda,” prosecutors responded in a note of conviction, arguing that the actions were motivated by money and politics, according to the BBC.
For her part, the forty-year-old apologized to the president’s daughter for her actions.
His accomplice, who also pleaded guilty, is also expected to receive his sentence at a later date.
