MANHATTAN (CN) - A federal judge sentenced a Florida man to time served with no supervised release on Tuesday afternoon for his role in a plot to steal President Joe Biden's daughter's diary and sell it to the conservative media outlet Project Veritas for $40,000.
Robert Kurlander, 61, and his co-defendant Aimee Harris were charged together in New York's Southern District in 2022 based on the Westchester County, New York, headquarters of Project Veritas - the conservative organization best known for its undercover video "sting" operations aimed at embarrassing progressive organizations and members of the mainstream media.
Harris and Kurlander entered guilty pleas in August 2022, admitting to their participation in a conspiracy to transport stolen items from Florida, where Ashley Biden had been living, to New York.
Harris and Kurlander pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property, which carried a maximum prison sentence of five years.
The federal guideline range for Kurlander's sentence was four to 10 months, but U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain found that his sentence warranted a downward variance due to his "prompt and candid" cooperation with federal prosecutors' investigations.
Swain, a Bill Clinton appointee, credited Kurlander for admitting his criminal conduct and accepting responsibility for his actions.
Standing to speak briefly at the sentencing hearing, Kurlander said, in deep baritone, "I feel like I'm the idiot of the century for even being involved."
Kurlander's attorney Florian Miedel, partner at Miedel & Mysliwiec, briefly described his client, "Bobby," as nearly suicidally depressed during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, due to a convergence of social isolation and a "litany" of underlying physical and mental health ailments.
Harris was sentenced in April 2024 to one month in prison.
Prosecutors had previously consented to a sentence without time behind bars, but after repeated adjournments and no-show appearances by Harris, they adjusted their sentencing request to include a guidelines range sentence of four to ten months in prison.
The criminal information against Harris and Kurlander described how they met with "employees of an organization based in Mamaroneck, New York," to work out the sale of the diary and additional stolen property belonging to the former president's daughter.
According to prosecutors, Harris texted Kurlander excitedly about the stash of Ashley Biden's personal items: "Omg. Coming with stuff that neither one of us have seen or spoken about," and added, "I can't wait to show you what Mama has to bring Papa."
Prosecutors say that payment amounted to $20,000 each for Harris and Kurlander. Swain ordered forfeiture in the amount of the $20,000 paid to Kurlander, which he had previously agreed to pursuant to his plea deal.
Prosecutors said the pair attempted, unsuccessfully, to sell the items to the Trump campaign before making a deal with Project Veritas.
Like Project Veritas, the president's daughter was not named explicitly in charging papers, nor is the type of property stolen. The details of the investigation have been public, however, and Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe has long insisted the group did nothing illegal.
Neither Project Veritas nor any staffers were ever charged with a crime, and the organization has said its activities were protected by the First Amendment.
O'Keefe said his group turned the journal over to law enforcement and did not publish information from it because it could not confirm that the diary belonged to Ashley Biden.
The Project Veritas founder and former Breitbart columnist initially described the person who found the diary as a "tipster."
"We took steps to corroborate the authenticity of the diary. At the end of the day, we made the ethical decision that because, in part, we could not determine if the diary was real, if the diary in fact belonged to Ashley Biden or if the contents of the diary occurred, we could not publish the diary and any part thereof," O'Keefe said in November 2021.
The FBI raided O'Keefe's Mamaroneck apartment as part of the diary probe, but a spokesperson for the group insisted that the organization's news-gathering activities were "ethical and legal."
In February 2023, the board of Project Veritas removed O'Keefe as the right-wing group's leader over purported "financial malfeasance" and accusations he spent an excessive amount of donor funds.
Project Veritas suspended all operations seven months later, after laying off most of its employees. In December of the same year, Hannah Giles, who succeeded O'Keefe as CEO of the organization, resigned.
The right wing news outlet National File eventually published excerpts of the diary in October 2020, and later followed up by publishing the full version.
The prosecution of this case was handled by the Southern District of New York's Public Corruption Unit.
Source: Courthouse News Service
