The DOJ does not agree to guilty pleas and cooperation arrangements with clearly culpable offenders unless it believes more attractive targets can be pursued.
The DOJ does not agree to guilty pleas and cooperation arrangements with clearly culpable offenders unless it believes more attractive targets can be pursued.
T he Justice Department on Thursday announced the guilty pleas of a woman and man in the FBI’s investigation into the theft of a highly personal diary and other items from Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter. The defendants have agreed to cooperate in the continuing probe, in which the major target is clearly Project Veritas (PV), the organization run by James O’Keefe, which does undercover investigative reporting that targets the media-Democrat complex.
The criminal information to which the defendants pled guilty alleges that people connected to Project Veritas (labeled “the Organization” in the charging document) knowingly abetted the theft of Ms. Biden’s property.
The federal investigation appears to have begun in November 2020. A year later, the FBI executed a search warrant at O’Keefe’s home, as well as other sites connected to Project Veritas. As I detailed at the time, the government was investigating the theft from Ms. Biden as an interstate movement of stolen goods (burglary itself is not a federal crime, but transporting theft proceeds across state lines is). PV was publicly known to be implicated in that it had somehow come into possession of the diary. O’Keefe claimed that his organization had learned about it through “tipsters” but opted not to publish it, and ultimately “gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner.”
I observed that, while O’Keefe’s version of events might be accurate, we’d be prudent to suppose he was not telling the whole story. Still, it did not appear that O’Keefe and Project Veritas were suspected of participating in the robbery. The search warrant indicated that they were seen as potentially guilty of accessory after the fact and misprision, meaning they’d learned about the theft and, alternatively, helped the thieves evade apprehension or failed to notify police.
The ramifications of the Justice Department’s pursuing a journalistic enterprise on such theories of criminal liability should have set off alarm bells throughout the press. But in its sting operations, right-leaning Project Veritas frequently targets the left-leaning media. These days partisan tribalism is a higher value than institutional solidarity. The press is thus quite content to see PV in the DOJ’s wringer. Though the basis for investigating PV seemed narrow, the FBI took advantage of it to do a wholesale rummaging through PV’s records, juicy portions of which were then leaked to the New York Times — which, when not publishing tax information purloined from Donald Trump and classified information lawlessly leaked by government officials, is a staunch critic of PV’s methods and is currently defending against an acrimonious defamation lawsuit filed by O’Keefe’s outfit.
The two Floridians who pled guilty on Thursday are 40-year-old Aimee Harris of Palm Beach and 58-year-old Robert Kurlander of Jupiter. Like her half-brother Hunter, Ashley Biden has had a troubled past, dotted with various addictions and run-ins with the law. Not surprisingly, she mostly stayed out of sight while her father was running for president (as, come to think of it, did he). After a 2019 rehab stint in Florida, she moved into a friend’s home in Delray Beach.
She relocated on June 17, 2020, apparently intending to return in the fall, so the friend allowed her to store her property in the home. Days later, the friend allowed Harris, an old acquaintance, to move in temporarily with her two children. The Times reports that Harris was in a bitter custody dispute and dire financial straits. While residing in the Delray Beach home, Harris learned that Biden fille had stayed there and found her property, seizing in particular on the diary.
Harris confided in her friend, Kurlander, about her find and asked for his help in cashing in. They first calculated that the best way to do that was to try to sell the diary to the Trump campaign. The pair thus attended a political fundraiser in Florida on September 6. But they were rebuffed. A Trump campaign representative (not identified in the charging documents) told the conspirators that the campaign had no interest in making a purchase and advised them to turn the diary in to the FBI.
The pair next turned to Project Veritas.
Kurlander made the initial contact on September 10, and a PV employee (not identified, but referred to as “he”) soon advised him and Harris to use an encrypted app for communications purposes. Kurlander did this, sending along photographs of Ashley Biden’s property that Harris had removed from the residence. At Project Veritas’s expense, Harris and Kurlander traveled from Florida to New York (“across state lines” in penal parlance), toting Biden’s diary, along with her digital camera and a storage card containing Biden family photographs.
On September 12, they met at an unidentified Manhattan hotel with the PV employee and someone the charging documents describe as PV “Executive-1.” Importantly, there is also a PV “Executive-2.” Though not present at the September 12 meetings (which included additional discussion over dinner), “Executive-2” is highlighted in the charging documents, and the implication is that Executive-2 is the higher-ranking PV official. Is Executive-2 O’Keefe, Project Veritas’s founder and still its most recognizable official? We don’t know. We do know that the PV employee is alleged to have “repeatedly informed Harris and Kurlander that he was working in consultation with and at the direction of . . . ‘Executive-2’[.]”
At the September 12 meetings, Harris provided the stolen property to PV and described for the PV executive and employee how she had obtained the property, adding that she still had access to the Delray Beach home where more of Biden’s property remained stored. The Justice Department adds that it was at this meeting that it was first “confirmed” in Kurlander’s mind that Harris had stolen these items.
Really? Perhaps. But I surmise that prosecutors insert this implausible detail because they anticipate eventually alleging that PV figures knew the items were stolen. That is, if Harris’s narration was enough to inform Kurlander that the Biden property was stolen, then it must also have been sufficient to inform the PV employee and executive. Ergo, when PV officials subsequently encouraged Harris to obtain more of Biden’s belongings, and then a PV official went to Florida to collect them and ship them to New York, they would have been committing federal felonies.
Beginning September 12, and in the days that followed, the PV employee urged Harris and Kurlander to steal more of Biden’s property. PV paid $10,000 for the diary and other items initially delivered, but the employee indicated that the value of these items to PV would increase if additional Biden belongings were obtained — primarily because that would help authenticate the diary.
This spawned negotiations between Kurlander and PV because of the “risks” he said Harris and he were taking. They wanted more money. Back in Florida on September 17, Harris and Kurlander proceeded to steal more of Biden’s property: tax documents, clothing, and luggage. The PV employee, meantime, flew to Florida. On September 18, Harris and Kurlander physically delivered Biden’s items to the PV employee in two installments, and the employee shipped them to New York the following day. Between September 18 and October 24, PV paid Harris and Kurlander $40,000.
Again, O’Keefe stresses that PV opted not to publish the diary. Though he insisted that PV made sure that law-enforcement officials got the diary (which was certainly big of PV after apparently paying over $40,000 for it), excerpts of the diary were published by a website called National File on October 24 — coincidentally, the same day as the final PV payment to Harris and Kurlander. National File claimed to have gotten the diary from a disgruntled PV whistleblower.
O’Keefe has said that PV tried to return the diary to a lawyer for Ashley Biden but that the attorney would not authenticate it as Biden’s property. At that point, O’Keefe says, PV gave the diary to a law-enforcement agency. He didn’t say which one, but the Times report cited above recounts that in early November 2020, after Election Day, PV arranged to have Ashley Biden’s property taken to the Delray Beach Police Department. A lawyer apparently involved in that delivery is said to have been “captured on video saying the belongings might have been stolen.” The feds got involved when the Delray police contacted the FBI.
The Justice Department does not agree to give guilty pleas with cooperation arrangements to clearly culpable offenders, such as Harris and Kurlander, unless prosecutors believe there are more attractive targets worth making a case against. O’Keefe and Project Veritas have made themselves some powerful enemies over the years. The problem with living dangerously is . . . you make yourself an attractive target.
Author’s Note: This piece has been updated to correct the name of the website that published excerpts of the diary and to more accurately reflect the amount of money PV paid to Harris and Kurlander.