Trump’s Own NSA Director Urged Harsh Penalties For Mishandled Confidential Docs
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Have you heard about the guy who took lots of highly classified documents from work and kept them at home, putting the country’s national security at serious risk?
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 efforts to keep and then hide top-secret documents from federal authorities at Mar-a-Lago, his residence and social club in Florida.
But while Trump was president, a much lower-profile government employee did something similar. Nghia Pho, a software developer at the National Security Agency, took “massive troves” of highly classified national defense information out of 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 to catch up on work at home. A federal judge ultimately sentenced him to five and a half years in prison.
And Trump’s own NSA director, Navy Adm. Michael Rogers, was among the federal law enforcement officials urging a harsh punishment for Pho.
“Mr. Pho retained classified information outside of properly secured spaces and by doing so caused very significant and long-lasting harm 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 may come in different forms and some of the harms may not be immediately apparent, the retention of classified information is no less damaging to the national security of our country and our ability to protect and defend the Nation against our adversaries,” said Rogers. “Mr. Pho’s illegal conduct violated the fundamental principle that classified information must be protected and maintained in properly secured places at all times.”
He concluded his letter by calling Pho’s actions “a breach of trust” and indirectly telling the judge to prove he stands with the intelligence community with his sentencing: “Affirmation by this court of the cost to the women and men who have dedicated their lives to public service and who have maintained trusted stewardship of national defense information will send them a message of confidence and respect.”
Donald Trump's former NSA director, Navy Adm. Michael Rogers, once urged a federal judge to hand down a tough sentence for a guy who took highly classified documents out of a secure location and kept them at home. Oops, Trump did this too!
The judge followed through with a stiff punishment. Prosecutors were pushing for eight years, one month shy of the maximum time Pho could face for the crime he pleaded guilty to. Russell settled on five and a half years, still a harsh penalty. He said it was necessary to create “a real deterrent” for others who might consider mishandling sensitive information.
Pho, now in prison, arguably did less damage to national security than Trump. Unlike the former president, the ex-NSA worker doesn’t appear to have lost any sensitive documents. When FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago last year, their search turned up 48 folders with classified markings that were empty. Beyond that, Pho was keeping documents at his private residence, not at a social club with more than 150 staffers, 500 members and a history of allowing suspicious foreign nationals to gain entrance.
Pho also didn’t 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 space, tried to conceal what he had done and prevented government agents from retrieving them.
Rogers was originally appointed to his post, which oversees the nation’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 HuffPost’s requests for comment on how he would compare the gravity of Pho’s actions to Trump’s or how severely he thinks the former president should be punished for compromising the country’s national security if he’s convicted.
The admiral was clear in his 2018 letter, though, about the serious risks of bringing intelligence community documents into your private home:
“The protection of classified information is an essential responsibility of all those working within the Intelligence Community, as the exposure of the United States’ classified information outside of secure spaces may result in the destruction of intelligence-gathering efforts used to protect this nation.”
