A woman who assisted with the attempted sale of classified nuclear-powered attack submarine secrets should get three years in prison, her lawyer said Wednesday.
A three year sentence “would be consistent with, and in some cases greater than, sentences imposed for other accomplices, as well as even some principle offenders,” Diana Toebbe’s legal counsel wrote in a memorandum filed Wednesday with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia Martinsburg.
Diana Toebbe is the wife of Jonathan Tobebe, a former Q-cleared federal employee who had worked for the government since 2012 and in 2020 organized a scheme to sell Virginia-class submarine secrets to what he thought was a foreign government but which in reality was the FBI.
Diana Toebbe’s lawyer provided a list of prior principle offenders and accomplices in federal espionage cases, including nine accomplices. Of these, seven drew stiffer sentences than Toebbe, according to the supplemental memorandum.
The pair were scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 9. Defendants file sentencing memoranda ahead of sentencing hearings in an attempt to influence judges’ decisions. Jonathan Toebbe himself originally pleaded out with the Justice Department for a three-year sentence, but Judge Gina Groh, a Barack Obama appointee, threw out the agreement in August, saying it was too lenient.
Jonathan Toebbe formerly worked at the Navy’s Reactor Engineering Division and the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in West Mifflin, Pa., near Pittsburgh. Fluor Marine Propulsion manages the site for the National Security Administration.
While working at Bettis, Jonathan Toebbe stole technical data about the Virginia-class submarine’s reactor. In 2020, he tried to sell the data to a foreign government that was never identified in court documents but which the New York Times reported was Brazil.
Diana Toebbe subsequently helped Jonathan Toebbe carry out what the couple thought was a series of clandestine sales of the classified nuclear-propulsion data but which was really an FBI sting operation. The bureau arrested the couple in 2021.
