Former CIA employee pleads guilty to leaking files on Israel’s Iran strikes
Asif William Rahman, 34, admitted guilt on two counts of “willful retention and transmission of classified information” related to national defense in a statement released on Friday.
According to a plea agreement, he is scheduled to be sentenced on May 15 and faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for both counts.
Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said in the statement, “Mr. Rahman betrayed the trust of the American people by unlawfully sharing classified national defense information he swore an oath to protect.”
The Justice Department’s guilty plea shows that it will make no effort to find and aggressively prosecute those who violate our national security secrets, according to the guilty plea.
Rahman, who the US government claimed had a Top-Secret security clearance and had been working for the CIA since 2016, was taken into custody in Cambodia in November by the FBI.
US officials were reportedly leaking documents that were created by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which analyzes images and information that were gathered by US spy satellites, according to US media reports at the time.
Additionally, the NGA supports covert operations of the US military.
The documents, which were published in October on a Telegram messaging app channel, stated that Israel was putting military forces in place to launch a military strike in response to an Iranian ballistic missile attack on October 1.
Iran claimed that those launches were carried out in revenge for the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, and the murder of a senior Iranian military official in Tehran.
In late October, Israel launched its own attack on several Iranian sites.
The Justice Department reported on Friday that Rahman had accessed and printed two “Top Secret” documents that contained information about a US “foreign ally” and its planned actions against a foreign adversary, citing court documents.
Source: Aljazeera
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