News/Commentary

Biden’s ex-DOE employee was sentenced to 180 days in jail for Vegas luggage theft, but won’t serve a day

April 14, 2023 | | Print Article

Disgraced former Biden administration official Sam Brinton, the infamous airport luggage thief, is finally beginning to face some justice after pleading “no contest” this Wednesday to misdemeanor theft charges. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that it’s not much justice at all.

“Samuel Brinton agreed to pay the victim restitution of nearly $3670, received a suspended jail sentence of 180 days, and must stay out of trouble,” Las Vegas station KLAS reported Wednesday.

That’s it.

The problem is that Brinton’s crime, which involved stealing $3670 worth of luggage, was originally a felony. But evidently, prosecutors chose to reduce the level of the charges, probably as part of the plea deal.

Regardless, Wednesday’s sentence applies only to Brinton’s theft of luggage from Vegas’ Harry Reid International Airport.

“A woman who had traveled from Dulles International Airport to Reid Airport on July 6 said she could not locate a piece of her luggage that she had checked with United Airlines,” according to KLAS.

“She filed a police report four days later. The luggage was described as gray with a hard shell and an ‘Away’ brand ‘Bigger Carry-On’ model valued at $320, documents said. The woman told police her stolen property had a total value of more than $3,670 and included jewelry, makeup, contact lenses, and clothing.”

Originally, all the authorities had to go on was surveillance footage.

According to Brinton’s eventual arrest warrant, the footage showed him pulling the victim’s luggage from the carousel, examining the luggage’s tag, placing the luggage back on the carousel, and then surveying the room to see if anybody was watching him.

According to the warrant, Brinton then repeated what he’d done a second earlier, except this time he kept the luggage and walked away with it.

Following the Las Vegas theft, Brinton reportedly went on to steal luggage from the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport on Sept. 16th.

As previously reported, Brinton flew into the airport from Washington, D.C., on Sept. 16th. He then proceeded to the baggage carousel, where he reportedly swiped a luxury Vera Bradley suitcase worth an estimated $2,325, removed the identification tags, and then left.

After the owner of the suitcase complained about her missing luggage, the authorities tracked the suitcase to Brinton, who initially denied he’d taken someone else’s luggage but quickly changed his story a few hours later.

“When Brinton … was confronted by police nearly a month later, [he] initially denied stealing the bag — insisting [his] clothes were inside the suitcase at the time,” according to the New York Post.

But Brinton “quickly backtracked and claimed [he] had taken the piece of luggage by mistake,” the Post notes.

Yet this claim was later contradicted by new evidence showing that, despite him claiming to have taken the luggage by accident, he’d continued using it for a month straight.

He was “captured on surveillance using the same suitcase on at least two trips to Washington, DC, on Sept. 18 and Oct. 9,” according to the Post.

When Brinton was publicly identified as a suspect in this particular case — the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport case — the officers in Las Vegas finally put two and two together and solved their own theft case.

“Detectives found Brinton’s Instagram page with a post dated July 6, according to police. The t-shirt in the photo and surveillance video matched,” KLAS notes.

(Source: Arrest warrant)

As previously reported, Brinton had also allegedly stolen from a famous female Tanzanian fashion designer who lives in Houston.

The fashion designer, Asya Khamsin, lost her luggage while at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on March 9th, 2018.

Four to five years later, she then noticed Brinton in newspaper/media photos wearing some of the same custom-made clothes she’d lost back at the airport years later.

“I saw the images. Those were my custom designs, which were lost in that bag in 2018. He wore my clothes, which was stolen,” she told Fox News two months ago.

Speaking on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson” last month, she revealed that Brinton still hadn’t been arrested for the alleged crime.

“In January, somebody called me and introduced himself. And he told me he’s working on my issue. But still today, I [have] nothing. I was asking myself how this person got my custom-made designs because it’s one-of-a-kind and wear[sic] them without fear and display in public,” she said.

Listen:

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Vivek Saxena
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