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A former F.B.I. intelligence analyst from Kansas obtained practically 4 years in jail in a case that bears parallels to that of former President Donald J. Trump, together with the identical cost of willful retention of nationwide safety secrets and techniques.
The analyst, Kendra Kingsbury, 50, was accused of improperly eradicating and unlawfully taking dwelling about 386 labeled paperwork to her private residence in Dodge Metropolis, Kan. She pleaded guilty to 2 counts of violating the Espionage Act.
Throughout her sentencing listening to in Kansas Metropolis, Mo., on Wednesday, Ms. Kingsbury stated she was loyal and didn’t apologize for taking the data. She was “responsible of being too sincere,” Ms. Kingsbury stated, as a result of she had advised the F.B.I. in late 2017 she had the paperwork. She criticized investigators, accusing them of vilifying her character.
Among the paperwork would have revealed the “authorities’s most vital and secretive strategies of accumulating important nationwide safety intelligence,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo, including that she eliminated delicate paperwork through the greater than 12 years she labored within the F.B.I.’s workplace in Kansas Metropolis.
In Mr. Trump’s case, he faces 31 counts of willfully retaining nationwide protection secrets and techniques, every of which carries a most sentence of 10 years in jail. The previous president has additionally been charged with conspiracy to impede justice, corruptly scheming to cover info from the federal government and mendacity to investigators.
Ms. Kingsbury, like Mr. Trump, was accused of not being useful or forthcoming with investigators.
Ms. Kingsbury’s lawyer attributed her conduct to a sequence of underlying occasions, together with severe well being issues she skilled after she started working with the F.B.I. in 2004 and a number of other deaths within the household, together with the homicide of her uncle in Texas.
“These items not solely resulted in bodily and psychological struggles for Ms. Kingsbury, but additionally brought about her difficulties together with her work,” her lawyer, Marc Ermine, wrote.
Her lawyer argued that Ms. Kingsbury ought to obtain probation for a number of causes. Not solely did she endure a public shaming, he stated, however he pointed to her lack of a legal report, her admission to the F.B.I. that she had the supplies and her consent to having brokers search her home.
“Her scenario has been publicized regionally and nationally — garnering point out alongside distinguished political figures whose conduct seems uncannily analogous to Ms. Kingsbury’s,” her legal professionals stated.
However prosecutors stated she revealed that she had taken dwelling the extraordinarily delicate paperwork solely after she suspected she was being surveilled.
Of their sentencing memo, prosecutors additionally disclosed that after reviewing her cellphone data, brokers realized that Ms. Kingsbury had contacted topics of F.B.I. counterterrorism investigations. She denied making and receiving the calls over a interval of years and supplied no clarification as to why she made them. Investigators have been unable to find out why she had reached out to individuals beneath investigation.
Prosecutors added that after she was indicted, they supplied her an opportunity to elucidate why she took the labeled supplies dwelling and the way she had used them. However Ms. Kingsbury declined to offer any extra info, prosecutors stated.
Ms. Kingsbury’s punishment, prosecutors stated, ought to replicate her conduct. They wrote within the memo that the “defendant was greater than reckless or careless with the belief that was positioned in her by the F.B.I.”
Prosecutors highlighted the calls to topics of bureau inquiries and famous that she was additionally “unhelpful” through the investigation.
Earlier than he sentenced Ms. Kingsbury, Choose Stephen R. Bough of Federal District Courtroom agreed with prosecutors that “we are going to by no means ever know what happened.”
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