Indianapolis Star | The Huffington Post
Donald John Sachtleben has signed plea agreements in two cases: One for possessing child pornography and another in which he’s accused of giving information about a terror plot to “a reporter from a national news organization.” Sachtleben, a bomb technician who worked at the FBI as a contractor after he retired in 2008, passed on the information to a reporter nine days before feds filed the child porn charges, Jill Disis reports.
Last May, the government developed an intense interest in the Associated Press’ sources for a story that detailed how the CIA stopped a bomb plot in Yemen. It secretly obtained phone records from AP reporters and editors, an action that started a national conversation about how the government should interact with journalists who receive leaked information.
The Huffington Post has Sachtleben’s plea agreement, which says his emails and text messages with “Reporter A” were “obtained from SACHTLEBEN’s electronic devices.” Sachtleben’s agreement calls for “43 months for the national security related charges and 97 months for the child pornography charges,” Disis writes.
Related: What journalists need to know about the Justice Department’s seizure of AP phone records | Feds explain why they grabbed AP records without negotiating first | CIA had told AP that security concerns about its story were ‘no longer an issue’
