I recently interviewed Aimee Harris, a single mother of two whom a federal judge sentenced to prison in April after she was convicted of attempting to sell Ashley Biden's diary across state lines to Project Veritas.
Harris, a Palm Beach County, Fla., resident, was given a month in prison and 90 days of home confinement over the diary, which belonged to the daughter of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. She had discovered it at a private residence where Ashley Biden was staying.
The judge also sentenced Harris to three years of probation and ordered her to pay back any money she earned from the sale.
Harris blamed some of her actions on bad advice from her co-conspirator, Robert Kurlander, and ongoing trauma from the custody battle over her children.
The Biden diary gained wide notoriety over a passage in which Ashley Biden admitted that she took "probably not appropriate" showers with her father as a child.
After two years of denials, the mainstream media finally admitted the authenticity of the diary's contents, which can be found online.
Snopes, the so-called fact-checker, published a letter from Ashley Biden to the court, demanding a harsher sentence for Harris while implicitly admitting that the allegations in the diary were indeed accurate.
Harris said that she found Ashley Biden's diary in the home of a close friend from New York. The friend generously let her stay at his Palm Beach home after she was forced to leave her Florida apartment during the early months of the pandemic in 2020.
"He was actually kind of a good friend who I lost because of this, and I feel terrible because it put him in this position," she told PJ Media.
The single mother has been locked in a six-year-long legal custody dispute with her ex-husband over their son and daughter, leaving her in tight financial circumstances.
Harris said that she and her kids were forced to flee from her ex on several occasions due to physical abuse.
After filing for separation, she agreed to a schedule where they would alternately share custody of their children, but she soon started to notice additional signs of abuse and sought a restraining order on him.
The continued abuse of her children by their father led Harris to eventually end up in the home where the diary was found.
"My friend gave me this opportunity to move 45 minutes south of where I was and guaranteed me that I would feel safe," Harris recalled to PJ Media.
"It was only supposed to be for like a long weekend. What started off as 'come and stay here with your children until you get yourself on your feet and find another place' turned into 'stay here as long as you need,'" she said.
Although a cleaning lady had allegedly cleared the room where she and her kids were to stay, she still found certain personal items, including medications and clothing, which left her concerned.
"When we got to our room, where a cleaning lady supposedly had been, there were blue pills all over the floor. I warned my son, who was three, and my daughter, who was four at the time. This was something that I left my ex for," said Harris.
"I’d never seen anything like it and I had to put them on the couch to clear the room. The pills were Wellbutrin, which has multiple uses. I think it’s for addictions or mental health problems. I only realized later that they belonged to Ashley Biden when I found a prescription with her name on it," she explained to PJ Media.
She also noticed birthday cards written to Ashley, but she ignored them and put them away.
When her host returned home one weekend in August 2020, Harris informed him that she threw out some dead flowers, which he immediately explained were for Ashley Biden, a friend of his.
"At that point, I had no idea who she was and I was like, 'Who is that?'" said Harris, who had no idea at the time that Joe Biden had a daughter as she knew very little about him.
"I know that you’re a Republican, and she's just my friend," said her host, who explained that Ashley was the daughter of the Democratic presidential nominee.
Despite being a registered Republican, Harris steadfastly denies that she sold the diary for political reasons, adding that she had been apolitical for most of her life.
"He said, 'You know who I campaigned for' and I was like, 'Look, you're my friend. I don't care.' I have friends from all walks of life," she responded.
She said that she still had friends back then who were Democrats, but they have since abandoned her.
"He told me this in front of two other people that also knew that she was there and that she showed up at his doorstep with a nurse after she was kicked out of rehab for relapsing, and she was withdrawing," said Harris.
She later found out that the Bidens' daughter stayed in the same bedroom only two days before she arrived.
"I didn't watch the news because I have really bad anxiety, and it's just so negative and very fake," she explained. "I really wasn't into politics that much back then. I remember growing up in some schools, [how] certain things were pushed on me, and politics just kind of turned me off. I just thought politicians were all crooked, you know."
Two months after she arrived at her friend's home, Harris found the diary while changing her bedsheets.
"All of a sudden, there's this book, and it's been so long, but honestly, I felt it was hers. I had this weird feeling that it belonged to her, but I didn't know why. I wanted to open it, and it took me several days, if not a full week, before I did," she said. "So when I opened the diary, I started looking up the names that were mentioned in it, and I saw that these were real people."
After reading parts of the diary, she thought somebody needed to see it, but she refused to hand it over to law enforcement due to her lack of faith in the legal system.
"I have personal experiences with law enforcement trying to protect my children," said Harris. "I have police reports from at least five different cities and Palm Beach County Sheriff's Department, DCF, CPT, pediatricians, four or five hospitals, and walk-in clinics. Nobody helped me and my children with the same kind of thing going on. Why in the world would I turn this over to the police or the FBI so they can go cover it up?"
"I know how the government works because I've been through it. They covered it up in court with my kids. I think everyone's crooked, but I do think there are a couple of good cops out there. I think there are a couple of good politicians out there, but the corruption far outweighs the good," she added.
In the end, Harris reached out to a couple of trusted friends, one of whom was Kurlander, who was later charged as a co-conspirator in her case.
"The crime I’m accused of is the conspiracy to take stolen items across state lines. I did not personally take it across state lines. My co-conspirator did," Harris said. "There are no reports of anything being stolen. It was abandoned. I gave the diary to a friend and, without my consent, he gave it to somebody else."
Harris said she entrusted Kurlander with Ashley Biden's diary for safekeeping and accused him of sharing its contents with his friends without her permission.
One of his friends, a local Republican donor and activist, gave him the idea to sell the diary to Project Veritas.
"The person that he gave it to gave him the idea of giving it to Project Veritas, which I'd never heard of before. So I looked them up, and I saw they were legit. They were not CNN, not ABC, and not the New York Times. They reported the truth," she said.
She said that Kurlander explained that he was only acting in her best interest when he and his friends eventually pressured her to sell the diary in August 2020.
The single mother of two said she was increasingly unable to pay her mounting legal bills, which would have ended the desperate fight to retain custody of her children, and she needed cash fast.
"When we started the contentious court battles in 2018, I basically went through my whole savings just trying to protect my children," said Harris, who added, "It's expensive to go to court, and as we all know, there's a two-tiered justice system."
Kurlander's companion, who devised the plan, told Harris that she had to save herself and that she should expose the diary for the sake of her children, if not her country.
"I thought, 'You know what? You're right.' I'm not going back on what I did, but I was too trusting and let these people take the book," recalled Harris.
Her friends then immediately contacted Project Veritas and bought Harris and Kurlander plane tickets to meet with the conservative media group in New York.
"I said to myself, 'Maybe I’m going up there to tell them what I found and that they'll wire some money to my family law attorney to help my case,'" said Harris.
Harris and Kurlander eventually received $20,000 each from the sale of the diary to Project Veritas.
"I didn't ask for millions of dollars. I asked for $10,000 to be wired to an attorney. That's it. The $10,000 turned into $20,000 to two different attorneys. None of the money ever hit my hands."
Harris said she made it clear that she did not want her name to be mentioned or to receive any praise. In return, Project Veritas promised to look after her if she faced any legal consequences from the deal.
She said they pledged that "if anything legal comes up, we'll help you with your legal problems," but "all they did was turn their freaking backs on me in the end."
After the meeting with Project Veritas, she immediately left her friend's home, where she had found the diary, and eventually found a new apartment. About a year later, on Oct. 21, 2021, the FBI came to Harris' door, and she turned herself in.
Harris, who could barely afford a retainer for her children, was forced to rely on public defenders, whom she accuses of being incompetent and giving her terrible legal advice.
When she and Kurlander were arraigned, she noticed several unfamiliar people in the courtroom. She asked her attorneys who they were, but they failed to identify them.
After looking them up, she discovered that one of them was Roberta Kaplan, who represented E. Jean Carroll, the woman who accused Trump of rape at Bergdorf Goodman.
"My own attorneys lied to me, and I asked them, 'Why wouldn't you tell me because that's very important for me to know. I want to know who's sitting in these rooms,'" Harris recalled to PJ Media.
She also blamed pain medications for clouding her judgment for most of her trial after she seriously injured her leg at work before her arraignment. Due to the medications, Harris vaguely remembered her public defenders urging her to take a plea agreement while also failing to inform her that this would make her a felon.
She was unaware of the consequences of the plea until a friend told her to call her attorneys immediately and ask them if that was the case.
"They were like, 'Yeah, what do you mean?' He said, 'We talked about this,' and I told him that I didn’t recall any of this conversation. I had no idea what I was signing up for," she said.
Harris initially only faced a probationary sentence until Ashley Biden's letter to the judge requesting a harsher penalty increased it to the current sentence.
"A month in prison. What is that?" asked Harris. She added, "You know, for my kids, that's going to be detrimental. It's going to traumatize and re-traumatize them because they can't even be without me for a couple of hours."
Harris has asked her attorneys to help her postpone her prison sentence during her appeal so that she can continue to care for her children.
"I need help for my children. They've given me some appellate attorney, but she's only doing a direct appeal. What I need is a habeas attorney, which they will not provide," said Harris. "Now, I know I'm a whistleblower, and now I've been targeted, and I've experienced a two-tiered justice system."
"Hunter’s got an illegal gun and all this cocaine. Might I add that I have [pictures of the] laptop in my hands? I happen to know the person who presented it to Congress. So, in January of last year, I took pictures of that, and that's why they wanted my phone. They wanted to make sure that I didn't take pictures of the diary. I wish I had made copies of it for sure," she noted.
Harris has also accused the media and Biden's Department of Justice of pursuing a smear campaign against her to justify the prosecution's case.
She said that mainstream news outlets published stories claiming that she had substance abuse issues and that she stole the diary to help President Trump's reelection efforts.
"I'm going to 'Kyle Rittenhouse' a lot of people and sue a lot of people for defamation because I've never been in rehab. That's just the start, you know," said Harris.
"I’ve never had a drug or alcohol problem. They tried to discredit me by saying in all of these articles that I found these materials from Biden in a rehab facility or that I found them in a halfway house, which is false because I had my children with me. I don't know too many places or rehabs that allow you to have your children with you," she added.
Harris explained that despite all of this, she still felt sympathy for Ashley Biden, as she was also sexually abused herself as a child.
"Listen, I have a lot of sympathy for her, and I want to make that very clear. I have more empathy than ten people put together and I feel terrible for her, I feel awful for her," she said. "I can relate to her in so many ways, and I begged not one, not two, but three attorneys to let me either write a letter to her, send a voice message, talk to her on the phone, meet with her to apologize for making her private life public because I know how that feels."
Editor's note: Some of the details of this article have been changed and updated at the request of the interviewee.
