An FBI analyst has been sentenced to 46 months in prison for illegally storing hundreds of classified documents in his home for 12 years.
Kendra Kingsbury, 50, of Garden City, Kansas, also pleaded guilty last October to two counts of illegally storing defense documents and was sentenced to three years of supervised release. Become.
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According to the Department of Justice (DoJ), Mr. Kingsbury served as an FBI analyst for 12 years until 2017, working on drug trafficking, violent crimes, violent gangs and counterintelligence cases, possessing top secret classified information, and working with national defense and They were able to access confidential information.
Kingsbury admitted during training that he repeatedly took documents from work and kept them at home, even though he was told that confidential information could only be stored in “approved facilities and containers.”
These were removed from the office on hard drives, compact discs and other storage media, the Justice Department said.
In total, Kingsbury kept 386 confidential documents at home and is said to have destroyed others that may contain classified information.
Prosecutors argued this was a national security risk because state-sponsored hackers may have targeted Kingsbury’s home IT systems to gather information.
Confidential materials she took from the FBI office included:
- Details of the FBI’s national objectives and priorities, including specific investigations that were not public at the time
- Documents on Sensitive Activities of Human Resources in National Security Investigations
- Information Gap Regarding Hostile Foreign Intelligence Agencies and Terrorist Organizations
- FBI Technical Capabilities for Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism Targets
- Sources and methods associated with government efforts to gather information on terrorist groups
- Information on al Qaeda members on the African continent, including those allegedly associated with Osama bin Laden
Investigators are concerned about the fact that Kingsbury appears to have contacted phone numbers associated with multiple targets in the counter-terrorism investigation, and that these same people called her. is. However, the purpose of the conversation remains unclear.