A Pentagon contractor was indicted Thursday on charges that he illegally removed and shared classified national defense information with a journalist, a case that has drawn national attention after federal agents searched a reporter’s home as part of the investigation.
Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones was charged with five counts of unlawfully transmitting and one count of unlawfully retaining classified national defense information, the Justice Department said Thursday.
He faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
The case, which has been linked to last week’s search of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson's home in Virginia, has drawn scrutiny from press freedom advocates who say it reflects a more aggressive posture by the Justice Department toward leak investigations involving journalists.
Perez-Lugones is accused of taking home printouts of classified documents from his workplace and later passing them to a reporter, FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement.
“Protecting our country’s secrets is essential to the safety of our most sensitive intelligence, military, and law enforcement operations," Patel said.
A Justice Department news release doesn't name the reporter or the reporter's employer, and the indictment itself wasn't immediately made public. The reporter co-wrote and contributed to at least five articles that contained classified information provided by Perez-Lugones, authorities said.
Investigators found phone messages between Perez-Lugones and the reporter in which they discussed the information that he provided, authorities said.
“I’m going quiet for a bit ... just to see if anyone starts asking questions,” Perez-Lugones said after sending one of the documents, according to the news release.
“Illegally disclosing classified defense information is a grave crime against America that puts both our national security and the lives of our military heroes at risk,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement.
Attorneys for Perez-Lugones didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Perez-Lugones, 61, of Laurel, Maryland, has remained jailed since his Jan. 8 arrest. He held a top secret security clearance and is accused of printing out classified and sensitive reports from where he works as a systems engineer and information technology specialist for a government contractor.
In October, Perez-Lugones took a screenshot of a classified intelligence report involving an unspecified foreign country and pasted the image into a Microsoft Word document that he printed out, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit.
Authorities found documents marked “SECRET,” including one in a lunchbox, when they searched his home and car this month, according to court papers.
On Wednesday, The Washington Post asked for a court order requiring authorities to return electronic devices that they seized from reporter Natanson’s home last week. Federal agents seized a phone, two laptops, a recorder, a portable hard drive and a Garmin smartwatch, according to a court filing.
A federal magistrate judge in Alexandria, Virginia, temporarily barred the government from reviewing any material from the seized devices. The judge also scheduled a Feb. 6 hearing on the newspaper’s request.
“The outrageous seizure of our reporter’s confidential newsgathering materials chills speech, cripples reporting, and inflicts irreparable harm every day the government keeps its hands on these materials,” the Post said in a statement.
Natanson has been covering Republican President Donald Trump’s transformation of the federal government. The Post recently published a piece in which she described gaining hundreds of new sources from the federal workforce, leading one colleague to call her “the federal government whisperer.”
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