Classified documents show up in odd places, portraying sloppy system beyond Trump, Pence, Biden

• Nhgia Pho aimed for a promotion at the National Security Agency in taking records home.
• Asia Lavarello printed classified documents for her thesis at National Intelligence University.
• Some workers jailed for taking home classified records argued high-profile violators got off easier.

WASHINGTON – Beyond the high-profile cases of classified documents found in the homes of President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, federal court records portray a sloppy system for tracking the country's most important secrets.

Intelligence agency staffers and contractors were caught in recent years squirreling away enormous troves of documents. One contractor mailed home computer hard drives filled with secrets from Afghanistan to Texas.

Stashes of secret documents have been scattered through homes, sheds and cars. Staffers sometimes copied documents onto compact discs or even handwritten notes. It wasn’t always the documents that got workers caught. One path to thousands of pages of classified records was strewn with marijuana leaves.

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Despite the sloppy handling, the secrets at stake were among the country’s most important. The names of undercover intelligence agents. How the country gathers its information. But from the top to bottom, searches to recover the records often came years after the filching began.

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Penalties for mishandling documents vary greatly. Biden, Trump and Pence face no charges. Retired Gen. David Petraeus, who led the war in Afghanistan and headed the CIA, was fined and not jailed for a misdemeanor for his infractions. But lower-level workers and contractors were sentenced to months or years in prison for felonies that lawyers argued were less egregious violations than Petraeus and others.

NSA contractor ‘two different people’ bringing secrets home

The hoard of classified documents FBI agents found in Harold Martin’s Cape Cod-style home, shed and car in Glen Burnie, Maryland, revealed what his lawyer called two sides of the same government contractor.

Martin was a Navy veteran with one of the highest security clearances, called top secret for sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI). He then became a contractor for government agencies including the National Security Agency from 1993 to 2016, according to court records.

But he was also an acknowledged binge drinker who owned 10 guns his wife didn’t know about, including a loaded handgun on the floor of his teal Chevy Caprice, an AR-15-style rifle and a shotgun, according to court records.

“You have someone who presents themselves as two different people,” public defender James Wyda told a judge in the case, with “some serious mental health issues going on here.”

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The August 2016 search came while authorities scrambled to find who was offering stolen government property on a variety of social media sites. But Martin was never charged with passing along secrets.

Even so, FBI agents discovered Martin had brought home over the decades 50 terabytes of digital information and thousands of printed documents, much of it top secret, according to court records. The secrets included the names of U.S. intelligence officers working undercover overseas, putting them and their operations at risk.

U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett sentenced Martin to nine years in 2019, after he pleaded guilty to willful retention of national defense information.

NSA staffer takes secrets home in misplaced bid for promotion

Nghia Hoang Pho, who was 68 at the time of his sentencing for taking a trove classified documents home to Ellicott City Maryland, said he was just trying to earn a promotion.

Armed with a TS/SCI clearance, Pho developed software to help the National Security Agency collect intelligence from foreign networks. He also helped the Defense Department detect and prevent unauthorized access to its networks.

But as he neared retirement, the Vietnamese native who became a naturalized citizen brought home documents from 2010 to March 2015, to work toward a promotion on nights and weekends.

“I did not betray the USA,” Pho said at his sentencing. “I did not send the information to anyone. I did not make a profit.”

U.S. District Judge George Russell sentenced Pho to 66 months in prison in 2018, after he pleaded guilty to the willful retention of national defense information.

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NSA director: Pho's action came at great cost to the NSA

Key documents are often kept sealed in criminal cases about classified records. But Nghia Pho's case struck a nerve.

Adm. Mike Rogers, then the director of NSA, wrote the judge a letter describing Pho's “very significant and long-lasting harm."

The agency provides “real-time to near-real-time insight to complex, evolving threat environments like terrorist actions, kidnappings, missile launches and military engagements,” Rogers said. But NSA had “no choice but to abandon certain important initiatives, at great economic and operational cost,” because of uncertainties about which secrets Pho might have revealed, he said.

“It’s like interrupting a team of surgeons in the middle of an operation to determine the sterility of a tool used in the procedure has been compromised,” Rogers added.

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Kendra Kingsbury, 50, of Dodge City, Kansas, was another longtime hoarder of secrets. As an FBI intelligence analyst with a TS/SCI clearance, she took home sensitive emails, intelligence notes and internal correspondence from June 2004 to December 2017, according to court records.

One charge against her covered documents about counterterrorism and cyber threats, including people in sensitive investigations and intelligence gaps regarding hostile foreign intelligence services.

The other charge dealt with collecting intelligence about terrorist groups including Al Qaeda in Africa and a suspected associate of Osama bin Laden.

“The breadth and depth of classified national security information retained by the defendant for more than a decade is simply astonishing,” said Alan Kohler, assistant director of FBI’s counterintelligence division.

Kingsbury pleaded guilty in October to two counts of gathering defense information. U.S. District Judge Stephen Bough set her sentencing for March 16.

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Marijuana growing tipped off authorities to secret government records

The clues leading authorities to thousands of pages of classified documents in Fairborn, Ohio, were signs of a marijuana-growing operation at Izaak Kemp's house. City police got a search warrant after finding plants, a digital scale and empty King Palm wrappers in his trash, according to court records.

Kemp, who had a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Dayton, worked as a contractor at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base with a top secret clearance for the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Air Force National Air and Space Intelligence Center.

He had printed and brought home 112 secret documents totaling 2,500 pages from January 2018 until authorities found them in May 2019, according to court records.

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Acting U.S. Attorney Vipal Patel argued Kemp exposed the classified records to greater risks of robbery because of the marijuana growing.

Kemp's lawyer, Ronald Keller, said at sentencing that he still had nightmares from the raid by five agencies including Fairborn police and the FBI, which featured 10 agents in tactical gear with an armored vehicle parked outside.

“He made no profit from these documents and he did not attempt to convey these documents to any entity with adverse interests to the United States of America,” Keller said.

U.S. District Judge Walter Rice sentenced Kemp to a year in prison in 2021, after he pleaded guilty to unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents.

Mailing secrets home from Afghanistan

Weldon Marshall spent decades collecting secrets and bringing them home to Texas.

He served in the Navy from 1999 to 2004, where he had a top secret clearance and access to documents describing the U.S. nuclear command, control and communications, according to court records. He downloaded the information onto a compact disc labeled “My Secret TACAMO Stuff” and took it home with him when he left the service, according to court records.

After the Navy, Marshall worked for companies providing information technology services on military bases in Afghanistan until his arrest in 2017. From Bagram Air Base, he shipped home laptops and hard drives totaling eight terabytes of memory – with secrets about flight and ground operations in that war-torn country – to Liverpool, Texas, according to court records.

U.S. District Judge George Hanks sentenced Marshall to 41 months in prison in 2018, after he pleaded guilty to one count of retention of national defense information.

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Patraeus' notebooks with top secret information found at his Virginia home

A casual attitude toward protecting secrets spanned all levels of government.

Petraeus wrote notes during his tenure in command in Afghanistan documenting his meetings, conferences and briefings. The writing eventually filled eight black notebooks measuring five-by-eight inches that contained top secret information about the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities, diplomatic discussions and deliberations at the National Security Council, according to court records.

Petraeus held onto the books after leaving the military, rather than transfer them with the rest of his classified papers to the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington. He lent the books to his private biographer for a week in 2011 despite telling her they were “highly classified” and contained “code word” information.

FBI agents found the notebooks during a 2013 search in an unlocked desk drawer in the first-floor office of his home in Arlington, Virginia. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for sharing classified information and was fined $100,000.

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Classified records are sometimes handwritten notes

As with Biden and Petraeus, lower level workers took handwritten notes of classified documents.

Reynaldo Regis, who worked for government contractors at the CIA for all but two years from August 2006 to November 2016, jotted secrets into dozens of notebooks authorities found at his home in Fort Washington, Maryland, according to court records.

Throughout his time at the CIA, Regis searched classified databases for highly sensitive reports and wrote in notebooks while sitting at his desk, according to court records. He memorialized “several hundred” pieces of classified information in about 60 notebooks authorities seized, according to court records.

Cary Citronberg, one of Regis’ lawyers, said after sentencing he “had no nefarious purpose. It was just a mistake.”

Judge Liam O’Grady sentenced him to 90 days in jail in 2018, after he pleaded guilty to unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents and making false statements to law enforcement officers.

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Lawyers: Regis penalized more than Petraeus and Berger, who did worse

Regis' lawyers contrasted his case to Petraeus and Sandy Berger, the former national security adviser, who were fined rather than jailed. Berger was fined $50,000 for removing classified documents and handwritten notes from the National Archives and making false statements.

“As a convicted felon, Mr. Regis has already been more harshly punished than the various comparably situated defendants listed above,” said lawyer John Zwerling, listing Regis' loss of his security clearance, his job and his reputation after serving 25 years in the military.

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Dinner party with a side of secrets

March 20, 2020 was a busy day for Asia Janay Lavarello. The civilian Defense Department staffer with a TS/SCI clearance was working temporarily at the U.S. embassy in Manilla, Philippines. She was also a student at National Intelligence University.

She printed classified documents for her thesis at the embassy and brought them back to her hotel room, where she hosted a dinner party that evening with two foreign nationals. A co-worker noticed the stack of documents marked "secret" in her bedroom and a guest helped her secure the documents two days later in a safe at the embassy.

Lavarello's embassy assignment was terminated for mishandling documents. She moved back Honolulu, Hawaii, where she was an executive assistant at the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Joint Intelligence Operation Center.

Naval investigators searched her office June 27 and found a handwritten notebook with "confidential" and "secret" information from embassy meetings in her top desk drawer. Investigators also found the sensitive notes in an email she sent herself Jan. 16, 2020, from her Gmail account to her unclassified government account.

U.S. District Chief Judge Michael Seabright sentenced her to three months in prison and fined her $5,500 in 2022, after she pleaded guilty to unauthorized removal and retention of classified information.

Contributing: The Associated Press

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