Friday, 19 Apr 2024

Ex-Senate Aide Gets 2 Months in Prison for Lying to F.B.I. About Contact With Reporter

A former aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee was sentenced on Thursday to two months in prison for lying to federal law enforcement agents about unauthorized contact he had with an unidentified reporter during a federal leak investigation.

The former aide, James A. Wolfe, 58, pleaded guilty in October to one count of making a false statement to the F.B.I. during an interview last December, when he denied that he had been in contact with reporters whose work was the focus of the leak probe.

His prison sentence will be followed by four months of supervised release, during which he must complete 20 hours of community service per month, said Bill Miller, a spokesman for the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

The judge, Ketanji Brown Jackson of United States District Court, also ordered him to pay a $7,500 fine, according to the spokesman. The government agreed to dismiss two additional charges of making false statements as part of the plea deal to which Mr. Wolfe agreed in October.

Mr. Wolfe’s lawyer, Benjamin B. Klubes, declined to comment on his sentencing.

Mr. Wolfe worked for more than 28 years as the director of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he was in charge of receiving, maintaining and managing classified national security information provided to the committee by the executive branch of the United States government.

[Read the court documents.]

He was also responsible for training committee staff on its policy regarding the news media, which prohibited employees — including Mr. Wolfe — from speaking to journalists unless they were specifically authorized to do so by the chairman or vice chairman of the committee.

The F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Wolfe in December 2017 as part of an investigation that began that April into the unauthorized disclosure of classified national security information that appeared in an article in a national news organization. Prosecutors have not specifically named the news organization or reporter involved in the charge to which he pleaded guilty.

In his guilty plea, Mr. Wolfe admitted he had lied to the F.B.I. when asked if he had given classified and publicly unavailable information to reporters. Prosecutors said he did so on two occasions in 2017, Oct. 16 and Oct. 24, when he provided a reporter with information about a witness who had been subpoenaed to testify before the committee.

Mr. Wolfe was indicted in June. His arrest brought to light that he had been in a relationship for more than three years with the journalist Ali Watkins while she worked at HuffPost, BuzzFeed News and Politico. She is now a reporter for The New York Times.

During the investigation, investigators secretly seized years of Ms. Watkins’s phone and email records without giving notice to the news organizations that employed her, as Justice Department guidelines generally require. Press freedom advocates criticized that move when it became public after Mr. Wolfe’s arrest.

But Mr. Wolfe’s sentencing on Thursday did not relate to Ms. Watkins. The charge to which he pleaded guilty in October was in connection with contacts he had with a different reporter, who was not named.

Emily Baumgaertner contributed reporting.

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