An FBI analyst has been sentenced to 46 months behind bars after illegally retaining hundreds of classified documents at her home over a 12-year period.
Kendra Kingsbury 50, of Garden City, Kansas will also face three years of supervised release after pleading guilty last October to two counts of unlawfully retaining documents related to national defense.
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An FBI analyst for 12 years until 2017, Kingsbury worked on drug trafficking, violent crime, violent gang and counterintelligence cases, and had top secret security clearance and access to national defense and classified information, according to the Department of Justice (DoJ).
Despite being told during training sessions that classified information could only be stored “in an approved facility and container,” Kingsbury admitted that she repeatedly removed documents from the workplace and kept them at her home.
These were taken out of the office on hard drives, compact discs and other storage media, the DoJ said.
In total, Kingsbury is said to have retained 386 classified documents at her home and destroyed others which could have contained classified information.
Prosecutors argued this was a national security risk, as state-backed hackers could have targeted Kingsbury’s home IT systems to harvest the information.
The sensitive material she took from FBI offices included:
- Details on the FBI’s nationwide objectives and priorities, including specific investigations that were open at the time
- Documents relating to sensitive human-source operations in national security investigations
- Intelligence gaps regarding hostile foreign intelligence services and terrorist organizations
- FBI technical capabilities against counterintelligence and counterterrorism targets
- Intelligence sources and methods related to government efforts to collect intelligence on terrorist groups
- Information about al Qaeda members on the African continent, including a suspected associate of Usama bin Laden
Of concern to investigators is the fact that Kingsbury appears to have contacted phone numbers linked to several subjects of counterterrorism investigations, and these same individuals made calls to her. However, the purpose of the conversations remains unclear.