The Justice Department’s announcement that two Florida residents had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport Ashley Biden’s stolen diary and other stolen items across state lines is the latest chapter in a long-running saga of attempts by former president Donald Trump and his supporters to dig up embarrassing information about President Joe Biden and his children.
Most of these efforts have centred around Mr Biden’s youngest — and only living — son, Hunter Biden.
The younger Mr Biden, who is a Yale-educated attorney and former lobbyist, was the focus of a concerted push by both Mr Trump and his allies to dirty up his father ahead of the 2020 election with a series of unflattering reports on his work for a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma.
The Hunter-Burisma operation was a major focus of ex-New York City mayor and former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and led to both a long-running federal probe of Mr Giulaini and to Mr Trump’s first of two impeachment trials.
The president’s son also figured in another Giuliani-orchestrated operation involving a laptop purportedly abandoned by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop, which many of Mr Trump’s conservative media allies have dubbed the “laptop from hell”.
The contents of that abandoned computer have been picked over and disseminated to numerous media organisations, some of which have made hay out of the more salacious pieces of content created during times when Hunter Biden was abusing crack cocaine. It was the hope that other documents purportedly from the computer pertaining to his work for Burisma would have been an effective “October surprise” for Mr Trump, but to the dismay of the ex-president’s allies, most news organisations ignored it.
It was around that same time that the two Florida defendants, Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander, would enter the picture, as would a diary belonging to Ashley Biden, Hunter’s half-sister.
Harris was invited by a friend to stay at a Delray, Florida house where Ms Biden had been staying. Like her half-brother, Ms Biden has struggled with addiction, and her stint in that Florida home was part of her recovery efforts after treatment.
According to court documents, Ms Biden left some items at the house with permission of the owner, including “a handwritten journal containing highly personal entries, tax records, a digital camera, a digital storage card containing private family photographs, a cellphone, books, clothing, and luggage”.
Harris, who stayed in the room where Ms Biden had stored her property, found what had been left for safekeeping. She contacted Kurlander and asked him to help her sell some the items, including the journal. He agreed and suggested the pair could make a “s*** ton” of money from the sale of Ms Biden’s items.
Harris and Kurlander first tried shopping the diary to a representative of Mr Trump’s re-election campaign at a 6 September 2020 fundraiser. But four days later, the Trump campaign representative told them that the campaign wasn’t interested and advised that they turn the items in to the FBI.
The same day Kurlander found out that Mr Trump’s campaign wouldn’t touch the stolen diary, he told Harris he had arranged a call with media group Project Veritas.
After receiving photographs of some of Ms Biden’s property, Project Veritas flew the duo from Florida to New York with several stolen items, including Ms Biden’s diary, her camera, and a photograph memory card.
Project Veritas representatives told them they would earn $10,000 from the diary and photographs, but said they would need to provide more of Ms Biden’s property to authenticate the journal and offered them more money if they did. They complied, meeting with a Project Veritas executive in Florida and providing more stolen property — including “tax documents, clothing, and luggage” — which was then transported back to the group’s New York headquarters. Each was paid a total of $20,000 for their efforts.
Eventually, Project Veritas leaders got cold feet and decided against publishing the diary. But before they decided not to do so, they tried contacting Ms Biden and Mr Biden’s campaign to request interviews about the diary’s contents. Ms Biden’s attorneys responded by alerting the FBI.
Although Project Veritas never published the diary, it was later leaked to another media organisation.
