The case of Kendra Kingsbury and the secret documents discovered at former president Donald Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, resembles each other in several ways.
On Wednesday, a former FBI intelligence expert who had illegally stored hundreds of documents in her home was handed a sentence that is almost four years in prison. Bough to a term of three years and ten months of imprisonment in federal prison without a chance of parole.
Kingsbury pled guilty to two counts of improperly keeping national defense-related documents in October. Kingsbury’s case includes claimed breaches of the Espionage Act, much like the accusations leveled against the former president Donald Trump.
Kingsbury, a security clearance holder with a TOP SECRET/SCI security clearance who spent a total of 12 years as an intelligence analyst for the FBI, was accused of frequently stealing confidential documents from a restricted area. She removed sensitive artifacts connected to national defense from her North Kansas City residence and kept them.
According to data from the prosecution, Kingsbury illegally retained 386 sensitive documents after taking them out of the proper place. The concealed documents, according to the prosecution, were stored on CDs, hard drives, and other types of storage devices.
Kingsbury is accused of telling investigators that she kept and destroyed additional documents that might have included sensitive or defense-related information.
Prosecutors stated in their memo for the sentencing that “the FBI eventually determined that over 20,000 records that began either at the FBI or some other governmental organization were found in the defendant’s residence.”
Prosecutors claimed that some of the documents, which described intelligence sources and techniques related to the federal government’s counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations as well as protection against cyberthreats, were classified “SECRET” by the FBI.
Along with records that probed into the FBI’s goals and priorities or that were connected to open investigations, prosecutors said they also discovered materials related to technical capabilities and sensitive human source activities in national security investigations.
Documents marked as “SECRET” by another government agency were also included in the national defense data that Kingsbury illegally held onto.
A suspected associate of Osama bin Laden and information about intelligence sources and procedures relating to U.S. government efforts to gather intelligence on terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda, were allegedly concealed in that batch of documents that were kept.
The FBI allegedly found Kingsbury in addition to “initiated search” in top-secret FBI databases using information gathered from the private and confidential government documents found at her home, the prosecution claims.
The reason the records were removed was the subject of an FBI investigation, which “revealed more questions and concerns than answers,” according to the prosecution
Kingsbury’s lawyer, Marc Ermine, pushed for probation on the grounds that Kingsbury “suffered from significant health issues and family traumas throughout her tenure with the FBI,” involving the murder of an extended family member, which interfered with her employment and led her to be struggling mentally and physically.
Trump is accused of ordering the removal and storage of sensitive information related to the nation’s defense from numerous locations within his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. This month, he entered a not guilty plea to 31 felony counts of retention of sensitive information in Miami.