Washington: A former FBI intelligence analyst from Kansas received nearly four years in prison in a case that bears parallels to that of former President Donald Trump, including the same charge of willful retention of national security secrets.
The analyst, Kendra Kingsbury, 50, was accused of improperly removing and unlawfully taking home about 386 classified documents to her personal residence in Dodge City, Kansas. She pleaded guilty to two counts of violating the Espionage Act.
Kendra Kingsbury worked for the FBI for more than 12 years.Credit: AP
During her sentencing hearing in US District Court in Kansas City, Missouri, Kingsbury said she was loyal and did not apologise for taking the records. She was “guilty of being too honest,” Kingsbury said, because she had told the FBI in late 2017 she had the documents. She criticised investigators, accusing them of vilifying her character.
Some of the documents would have revealed the “government’s most important and secretive methods of collecting essential national security intelligence,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo, adding that she removed sensitive documents during the more than 12 years she worked in the FBI’s office in Kansas City.
Her case and punishment, and others like it involving violations of the Espionage Act, reflect how seriously the government takes such charges and offer a glimpse of how aggressively the Justice Department might pursue its case against Trump.
In Trump’s case, he faces 31 counts of willfully retaining national defence secrets, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. The former president has also been charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, corruptly scheming to hide information from the government and lying to investigators.
Kingsbury, like Trump, was accused of not being helpful or forthcoming with investigators.
Kingsbury’s lawyer attributed her behaviour to a series of underlying events, including serious health problems she experienced after she began working with the FBI in 2004 and several deaths in the family, including the murder of her uncle in Texas.