Former FBI worker sentenced for illegally holding classified materials

As President Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump come under scrutiny for their handling of state secrets, a former FBI analyst has gotten a nearly four-year sentence for illegally possessing hundreds of classified documents.

Kendra Kingsbury of Garden City, Kansas, was sentenced Wednesday to three years and 10 months in federal prison in the decision handed down by U.S. District Judge Stephen Bough, NBC News reported.

The 50-year-old Kingsbury pleaded guilty back in October to two counts of illegally retaining material pertaining to national defense.

Kingsbury’s case has drawn similarities to Trump’s ongoing trial in particular.

For over 12 years, Kingsbury held a top secret security clearance and served as an intelligence analyst for the FBI.

Now, she will serve time for using that clearance to continually and improperly take sensitive materials from a secure worksite, prosecutors said.

In total, Kingsbury removed and retained about 380 classified documents, which she stored in various forms including compact discs and hard drives, according to court documents.

Breaking News

As it happens

Get updates on the coronavirus pandemic and other news as it happens with our free breaking news email alerts.

Investigators also allege Kingsbury admitted to retaining and destroying additional documents which may have contained classified or national defense-related material.

“The FBI ultimately determined that over 20,000 documents that originated either at the FBI or some other government agency were found in the defendant’s residence,” prosecutors said in their sentencing memo.

They added that Kingsbury kept classified documents which could have “revealed some of the government’s most important and secretive methods of collecting essential national security intelligence.”

Kingsbury’s attorney, Marc Ermine, claimed his client “suffered from extensive health issues and family tragedies throughout her tenure with the FBI.”

Ermine argued that the combined mental and physical exhaustion caused difficulty for her at work.