Judge Gives Long Sentence to Couple Who Tried to Sell Submarine Secrets

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/us/submarine-couple-sentence-judge.html

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WASHINGTON — A federal judge sentenced a Navy engineer to 19 years in prison on Wednesday and — in an unusual twist — handed his wife nearly 22 years for the couple’s botched attempt to sell sensitive nuclear propulsion secrets to a foreign country.

U.S. District Judge Gina M. Groh gave a longer term to Diana Toebbe even though it was her husband, Jonathan, who held the security clearance and took the sensitive documents from the Navy. Judge Groh said the longer sentence for Ms. Toebbe was mainly because she found that Ms. Toebbe had tried to obstruct justice by attempting to send letters to her husband while in jail.

Judge Groh said that both had committed a serious crime that had caused grave harm to the nation. Prosecutors had asked for just three years for Ms. Toebbe, but Judge Groh said the offense was “not your usual case.” In delivering her sentence, the judge said that while Mr. Toebbe, 44, had access to the information, Ms. Toebbe, 46, was “driving the bus” and had a big role in crafting the plan and covering it up.

Judge Groh had thrown out the original pleas by the Toebbes in August, arguing they were too lenient and forcing them to cut new deals with prosecutors, which opened the prospect of much longer prison sentences.

At the sentencing hearing in Martinsburg, W.Va., on Wednesday, Judge Groh called the Toebbes confessed traitors and repeatedly cited the sophistication of their scheme to sell government secrets by using covert communications and even hiding information in a peanut butter sandwich. She questioned prosecutors’ theory that Mr. Toebbe was more responsible for the crime.

Judge Groh also said Mr. Toebbe, unlike his wife, had used his time in jail productively, teaching inmates, and she said he deserved credit for those actions.

“His remorse that he expressed to the court is truly genuine,” she said.

Judge Groh’s stance put prosecutors in the unusual position of arguing for a more lenient sentence for Ms. Toebbe, saying that her husband bore responsibility for the crime.

Jonathan Toebbe worked at the Washington Navy Yard on the nuclear reactors that power America’s secretive fleet of submarines, and Diana Toebbe was a teacher at an elite private school in Annapolis, Md., when they conceived of a plan to try to sell intelligence to Brazil, according to court documents and officials briefed on the investigation.

There is no evidence that the Toebbes had taken top secret information — prosecutors said the information Mr. Toebbe tried to sell was only classified as “confidential,” a lower level. Nevertheless, Judge Groh said the Navy must assume the information Mr. Toebbe took had fallen into the hands of entities who wish to harm the United States.

Brazil has a plan to build its own nuclear submarines, and the Toebbes believed the country was a relatively friendly country that would still pay for access to nuclear secrets. But Brazil valued its ties to American intelligence agencies too much to place them at risk of making a deal with an unknown spy. So Brazilian military intelligence officials turned over the letter Mr. Toebbe had anonymously sent them to the F.B.I., triggering an effort by agents in the United States to learn his identity.

In a statement that he read in court, Mr. Toebbe said he had brought shame and trauma to his children and wife by his actions. He said mental health challenges that his family faced and his own stress at work had led to his drinking heavily. He said he then began to think that democracy in America was under threat and that he needed to take action to save his family and get them out of the country.

“I recognize now that I was in the midst of a nervous breakdown,” Mr. Toebbe said. “I am in anguish over what I’ve done. And I know I will never be able to make it right.”

Fighting back tears, Ms. Toebbe read a statement accepting responsibility, but she also suggested that the scheme was her husband’s not her own.

“I made a catastrophic decision,” she said. “Initially, I should have followed my instinct and tried harder to talk my husband out of his plan. But then my family’s difficulties continued. My depression was at an all-time high. And I felt like the country’s political situation was dire. I didn’t just fail to talk him out of it. I actually participated in helping him, and I wanted him to succeed.”

Ms. Toebbe said one of her two children was living with a grandparent, the other with her brother and sister-in-law. “Their lives will be forever marked by the decision I made,” Ms. Toebbe said.

At the start of the hearing, one of Ms. Toebbe’s lawyers, Barry P. Beck, asked Judge Groh to consider a sentence of three years prison time in line with their original plea deal, and below the statutory guidelines. But the judge instead began a discussion about whether Ms. Toebbe’s sentence should be lengthened beyond the guidelines.

Judge Groh read two letters that Ms. Toebbe tried to send to her husband in December 2021 and January 2022 that stated that she did not know anything, blaming him for the crime and asking him to plead guilty so that she might be able to return to their children.

One letter was sent through the jail laundry; the other was sent to a fake address with Mr. Toebbe’s name on the return address. Both letters were intercepted by the jail before they got to Mr. Toebbe.

Judge Groh said she was upset that she had not been made aware of the letters earlier. She ruled that the letters were an obstruction of justice, effectively adding 10 additional years to Ms. Toebbe’s sentence. She said the letters were part of a plan by Ms. Toebbe to pressure her husband to perjure himself by falsely saying she knew nothing about the plot.

“That’s obstruction, plain and simple,” Judge Groh said. “It’s encouraging a co-defendant to lie to save the other co-defendant’s rear.”

But prosecutors argued Judge Groh was considering adding years to Ms. Toebbe’s sentence for two letters that never reached her husband and had no effect on the case. Jarod Douglas, a federal prosecutor, said that even if the court sentenced Ms. Toebbe to the low end of the range Judge Groh was originally considering, it would be a disparity from other cases.

Mr. Douglas said the government believed Ms. Toebbe should face just three years in prison because Mr. Toebbe held the classified clearance and was responsible for safeguarding the documents. It was he, not his wife, who had that culpability.