Have you heard of the man who took many highly classified documents from work and kept them at home, seriously endangering the national security of the country?
Yes, this is why President Donald Trump turned himself in for arrest on Tuesday. He pleaded not guilty to 37 felony counts related to his attempts to preserve and then hide top secret documents from federal authorities at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence and social club.
But while Trump was president, a much less prominent government employee did something similar. Nghia Pho, a software developer at the National Security Agency, took “huge assets” of highly classified national defense information from a secure location at work and kept them at home. Pho, a Vietnamese immigrant who was working on his English, said he was falling behind his peers in promotions and wanted to try catch up on work At home. A federal judge eventually sentenced him to five and a half years in prison.
And Trump’s own NSA director, Admiral Michael Rogers, was among federal law enforcement officials who pushed for a harsh sentence for Pho.
“Mr. Pho stored classified information outside highly secured areas, thereby causing very significant and long-lasting damage to the NSA, and consequently to the national security of the United States,” Rogers wrote in an unusual three-page letter to U.S. District Judge George Russell III.
“While criminal conduct involving matters of national security can take various forms and some harm may not be readily apparent, the retention of classified information is no less detrimental to our nation’s national security and our ability to protect and protect the nation. to defend. against our opponents,” Rogers said. “Mr. Pho’s illegal conduct violated the fundamental principle that classified information should be protected at all times and kept in properly secured places.”
He concluded his letter by calling Pho’s actions “a breach of trust” and indirectly telling the judge that he must prove with his conviction that he stands with the intelligence community: “Confirmation by this court of the costs for the women and men who lost their lives dedicated to public service and who have maintained the trusted management of national defense information will send them a message of trust and respect.
The judge followed through with a stiff sentence. Prosecutors pushed for eight years, one month before the maximum time Pho could get for the crime he pleaded guilty to. Russell got through five and a half years, still a heavy sentence. He said it was necessary to create “a real deterrent” for others who might consider mishandling sensitive information.
Pho, now in prison, has arguably done less damage to national security than Trump. Unlike the former president, the ex-NSA employee does not seem to have lost any sensitive documents. When FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago last year, their search surfaced 48 folders of classified marks that were empty. Further, Pho kept documents in his private home, not in a social club with more than 150 staff, 500 members and a history of allowing suspicious aliens to gain entrance.
Pho also did not lie to federal law enforcement officials about what he had done and worked with them to remedy the situation. Trump, meanwhile, knowingly took classified documents to an unsafe place, tried to hide what he had done and prevented government agents from recovering them.
Rogers was originally assigned to his post, which oversees the country’s cyber-intelligence and cybersecurity efforts, under former President Barack Obama. Trump kept him on until Rogers retired from the Navy in 2018.
The former NSA director did not respond to JS’s requests for comment on how he would compare the severity of Pho’s actions to Trump’s or how severely he thinks the former president should be punished for endangering the country’s national security if he is convicted.
However, the Admiral was clear in his 2018 letter about the serious risks of bringing intelligence community documents into your private residence:
“The protection of classified information is an essential responsibility of everyone working within the intelligence community, as the disclosure of the United States’ classified information outside of secure areas could lead to the destruction of intelligence-gathering efforts used to protect this nation. to protect.”