JNS
Asif Rahman’s actions were “reckless” and “dangerous,” according to the judge, but the sentence is less than half what prosecutors sought.
The former CIA analyst Asif Rahman, who admitted in January that he leaked classified information about Israel’s military response to Iran’s missile attacks on Oct. 1, 2024, was sentenced on Wednesday to 37 months in prison, the U.S. Justice Department said.
The 34-year-old had faced up to 10 years in jail for the two counts—illegally retaining and transmitting classified national security information.
“For months, this defendant betrayed the American people and the oaths he took upon entering his office by leaking some of our nation’s most closely held secrets,” stated John Eisenberg, assistant U.S. attorney general for national security.
The Justice Department announcement did not mention Israel by name. It stated only that the documents were about a U.S. foreign ally and its planned actions against a “foreign adversary.”
“Rahman removed the documents, photographed them and transmitted them to individuals he knew were not entitled to receive them,” it stated. “By Oct. 18, 2024, the documents appeared publicly on multiple social media platforms, complete with the classification markings.”
Rahman had been a CIA employee since 2016 and carried a top secret security clearance, including access to sensitive compartmented information, which refers to materials about intelligence sources and methods, and the analytical processes used to generate them.
The Cincinnati native and Yale University and University of Chicago graduate admitted to accessing and printing two top-secret documents on Oct. 17.
The leak forced Israel to delay a strike, according to federal prosecutors, though Israel took military action on Oct. 26 as part of a back-and-forth series of strikes.
The Justice Department stated that Rahman tried to delete evidence of his activities on his workstation but continued to access and print highly-classified and sensitive documents, and to transmit them to more people without clearance to view them, until he was arrested in Cambodia, where he was stationed, on Nov. 12.
After pleading guilty in January, Rahman reportedly cooperated with authorities. In addition to the three years and a month in prison, he was sentenced to two years of probation and $50,000 in fines.
“For someone who has lived such a law-abiding life for all these years,” The Intercept reported the judge saying during sentencing, “for you to go from that to this—reckless, dangerous—I understand that something must have been going on.”
Rahman’s motives remain unclear. His lawyers said that he suffered from trauma from an assignment in Iraq and stress over geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.
“I fully accept responsibility for my conduct last year,” Rahman said in court. “There was no excuse for my actions.”
