A former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst has plead guilty to sharing top secret information with two reporters and now faces up to 10 years in federal prison, Fox News reports.
“Henry Kyle Frese, 31, of Alexandria, Virginia, was a counterterrorism analyst from February 2018 to October 2019 and held top-secret security clearance,” writes Fox News.
Frese pleaded guilty to willful transmission of top secret materials to the two journalists in 2018. Prosecutors said that Frese was in a relationship with one of the journalists and sought to advance the reporter’s career.
Between the spring and summer of 2018 the journalist Amanda Macias, a national security reporter for CNBC linked romantically to Frese published at least eight articles containing classified information related to the capabilities of certain foreign countries’ weapons systems. Prosecutors asserted that Frese compromised the contents of at least five intelligence reports, according to court documents cited in a press release from the Department of Justice (DOJ).
According to court documents, Frese and the reporter lived together from January 2018 to November 2018. Macias direct messaged Frese on Twitter, asking if he would be willing to share more information with another reporter. Frese told Macias he would be willing if it would help her career. Around April 2018, Macias introduced Frese to Courney Kube, a pentagon reporter for NBC, whom he began texting and speaking with by telephone, according to the DOJ.
In court documents both Macias and Kube are identified as Journalist 1 and Journalist 2, they have since been publicly identified by multiple media outlets.
The weapons systems identified in Macias and Kube’s co-authored article were Chinese military anti-ship missiles.
“Frese violated the trust placed in him by the American people when he disclosed sensitive national security information for personal gain,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers. “He alerted our country’s adversaries to sensitive national defense information, putting the nation’s security at risk.”
Frese retweeted his girlfriend’s posts on Twitter that announced the publication of her stories using the classified information, according to the justice statement.
Frese was arrested in October. He pleaded guilty Thursday to the willful transmission of top-secret national defense information. He faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison when sentenced in June.