Sailor Sentenced To One Year For Taking Photos Of Nuclear Attack Submarine
U.S. Navy submariner accused of photographing his ship’s secret nuclear propulsion system was sentenced to one year in prison followed by six months of home confinement on Friday in a case critics say illustrates a double standard in the way high and low government employees are treated for mishandling classified information.
In an argument for leniency, lawyers for machinist mate Kristian Saucier, who served on the Groton-based nuclear-powered attack submarine USS Alexandria, pointed to a half-dozen or so government-secrets cases that ended in milder punishment or no punishment at all, including that of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Last month FBI director James B. Comey questioned Clinton’s judgment and accused her of carelessness in her handling of classified and secret email correspondence while secretary of state. But he recommended — and the Justice Department agreed — against prosecution, based on what he said was the absence of evidence that Clinton intentionally transmitted or willfully mishandled classified material.
Federal prosecutors dismissed Saucier’s claim about disparate treatment, accusing his lawyers of “grasping at highly imaginative and speculative straws in trying to further draw a comparison to the matter of Secretary Hillary Clinton based upon virtually no understanding and knowledge of the facts involved, the information at issue, not to mention any issues if intent and knowledge.”
When imposing sentence, U.S. District Judge Stefan Underhill, never referred specifically to Clinton but rebuked Saucier’s lawyers for comparing the cases.
“The question of selective prosecution is a very tenuous issue to raise at the time of sentencing,” said Underhill.
“Both sides have tried to equate this case to other cases,” he said. “But to a very significant degree, Mr. Saucier brought that upon himself because he destroyed the evidence that could have proven his innocence or at least proven he was not acting at the behest of someone else.”
Saucier faced a sentence of 51/2 to 61/2 years, but Underhill said after hearing hours of argument and evidence Friday that Saucier’s actions were more in the nature of a terrible lapse of judgment than they were an effort to undermine national defense.
The prosecution said Saucier took 12 highly sensitive photographs — including two from inside the Alexandria’s reactor department — with a cellphone camera and held on to them for years. Collectively, the prosecution said the photographs show the ship’s entire reactor-powered propulsion system and reveal, in close-up, key design elements. The images are said to show the ship’s location when they were taken, and a console indicating maximum dive depth, a closely guarded secret.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Vanessa Richards said one of the photographs could have enabled a foreign power to reverse-engineer the Alexandria’s nuclear reactor.
The prosecutors said Saucier later obstructed an investigation by lying to U.S. Navy and FBI investigators and destroying evidence, including a laptop computer, a camera and a computer memory card.
Without the digital equipment, prosecutors said the FBI and Navy were unable to determine “to any degree of certainty if the information had been distributed or otherwise compromised.” Still, prosecutors said investigators uncovered indications of a plan to distribute the images.
They said the sequence and subject of the photos, taken between January and July 2009, suggest Saucier may have used the earliest images to demonstrate to some other party that he had access to sensitive shipboard systems. They said the compression of one photograph was typical of it having been transmitted. Saucier also had become disillusioned with the Navy, they said.
Derrick Hogan, Saucier’s lawyer, said Saucier never intended to damage national security and he asked for a sentence of probation.
The Alexandria is known as a Los Angeles, or 688-class attack boat designed to hunt and destroy enemy submarines. The ships, used in some of the country’s most sensitive intelligence missions, date to the 1970s, but remain a key element of the U.S. fleet.
About half the class was built in Groton by the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics. The submarines’ design and performance characteristics are closely guarded government secrets.
When he pleaded guilty in May to a charge of unauthorized retention of defense information, Saucier claimed the photographs were an irresponsible lapse in judgment and that he never transmitted the photos or disclosed or tried to disclose them to any unauthorized recipient.
“Mr. Saucier admitted that he knew when he took the pictures in 2009 that they were classified and that he did so out of the misguided desire to keep these pictures in order one day to show his family and his future children what he did while he was in the Navy,” his lawyers wrote in a legal memo.
Saucier’s defense team collected more than 100 pages of letters from shipmates, friends and family to buttress his plea for leniency. Two of his shipmates have admitted using cellphones to take unauthorized selfies of themselves in restricted areas of the Alexandria and were punished with demotions and payroll deductions. Prosecutors said there is no comparison between their conduct and that of Saucier.
Authorities learned of Saucier’s security breach when he tried to dispose of his cellphone while living in the eastern Connecticut town of Hampton, north of the U.S. Naval Submarine Base in Groton. The town dump foreman in Hampton, a retired Navy sailor, found the phone in a dumpster and decided to keep it. When he noticed it contained potentially sensitive photographs, he showed them to a retired Navy chief, who called the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
The Navy is in the process of dismissing Saucier from the service. While the charges were pending, he was assigned to a training station in upstate New York.
Rear Adm. Charles A. Richard, director of the Navy’s Undersea Warfare Division, urged that Saucier be given a sentence at the top of the sentencing range.
“The unauthorized photographs that Mr. Saucier created, and retained over an extended period of time, included information that captured some of the most secure and sensitive areas of the USS Alexandria nuclear attack submarine,” Richard wrote in a letter to the court. “As a consequence of this, the Navy must operate on the basis that this protected information, a critical component of the national defense, has been compromised.”
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Source: Hartford Courant
