A former FBI agent from Kansas will serve prison time for illegally keeping classified documents related to national defense at her home, the Justice Department said.
Kendra Kingsbury, who worked as an intelligence analyst for the FBI’s Kansas City Division, was sentenced on June 21 to three years and 10 months in federal prison without parole. The 50-year-old resident of Garden City, Kansas, pleaded guilty in October 2022 to two counts of unlawfully retaining documents related to national defense.
Similar to some of the federal charges former President and 2024 Republican front-runner Donald Trump is facing, Kingsbury was accused of mishandling national security-related information in violation of the Espionage Act.
Kingsbury, who worked for the FBI for more than 12 years and held a top secret/sensitive compartmented information security clearance, admitted that she “repeatedly moved” an “abundance of sensitive government materials” from her workplace to her former residence in north Kansas City, Missouri. Some of the documents she removed and kept in her home contained “extremely sensitive national defense information.”
“In total, Kingsbury improperly removed and unlawfully and willfully retained approximately 386 classified documents in her personal residence,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri said in a statement. The documents she retained were stored in various formats, including hard drives and compact discs.
Prosecutors claimed in court documents that Kingsbury “put national security at risk” because those files could reveal “some of the government’s most important and secretive methods of collecting essential national security intelligence.”
Some of the documents were classified as “secret” by the FBI, according to prosecutors, and they detailed intelligence sources and methods related to the federal government’s counterterrorism and counterintelligence efforts, defending against cyber threats.
“In addition, Kingsbury retained documents relating to sensitive human-source operations in national security investigations, intelligence gaps regarding hostile foreign intelligence services and terrorist organizations, and the technical capabilities of the FBI against counterintelligence and counterterrorism targets,” prosecutors alleged.
“The documents included information about al-Qaeda members on the African continent, including a suspected associate of Usama bin Laden. In addition, there were documents regarding the activities of emerging terrorists and their efforts to establish themselves in support of al Qaeda in Africa.”
Prosecutors said Kingsbury was also found to have “initiated searches” in classified FBI databases using information obtained from the sensitive and classified government materials uncovered at her home.
An FBI investigation into why she took documents away from her workplace “revealed more questions and concerns than answers,” prosecutors said, noting that she had been in contact with suspicious individuals who are subjects of counterterrorism investigations.
The sentencing comes in light of a series of discoveries of classified documents at former leaders’ private homes and offices.
On Aug. 8, 2022, the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, seizing boxes of material, some of which included classified documents Trump allegedly took with him at the end of his first term. Trump now faces 37 counts of seven charges, including willful retention of national defense information, corruptly concealing documents, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and making false statements.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges and has called the indictment a political witch hunt.
Meanwhile, as early as November 2022, President Joe Biden’s lawyers found that classified documents were discovered at the president’s former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington. In December, additional documents were found at his home in Delaware. Neither discovery was made public until January 2023, when the media broke the story, and the White House confirmed it.
Lawyers for former Vice President Mike Pence have also reported that they found “a small number” of classified documents at his Indiana home. They said Pence himself elected to do the search after learning of the classified documents that had been discovered at Biden’s Delaware residence.
