Three years in prison are too few for a former Naval Reactors employee who wanted to sell stolen nuclear submarine secrets to a foreign government, a federal judge said last week.
Thursday’s pronouncement by Judge Gina Groh, a Barack Obama appointee in the U.S. District Court for West Virginia’s Northern District, blew up a government plea deal reached earlier this year between the Department of Justice and former Q-cleared employee Jonathan Toebbe.
Toebbe roped his wife Diana Toebbe into a bizarre amateur spycraft scheme that got them both nabbed by the FBI in a sting operation in late 2020 after two years of active scheming. The couple now will face a jury in a trial scheduled for Jan. 17, according to an Aug. 18 order from Groh, who rejected the plea agreement.
The Toebbes planned to sell encrypted digital documents containing classified information about Virginia-class nuclear submarines and then flee the U.S., according to court documents. The Justice Department last year announced that Jonathan Toebbe planned to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to communicate restricted data: a crime that could have sent him to prison for at least 12-and-a-half years.
But Groh last week revealed that the plea deal included “a binding term of no more than 36 months imprisonment” for Jonathan Tobbe, whose scheming from 2018 to 2020 “could have easily caused great harm to the Navy, the United States, and even the world.”
“The time contemplated by Mr. Toebbe’s plea also falls short given the backdrop of the parties’ motivation, his trusted employment position and the threats to national and global security and service personnel alone that his actions caused,” Groh wrote in her order. “It was not in the best interest of the community, or the country, to accept these plea agreements.”
The Toebbes made national headlines in late 2021 when media broke news of their arrest following the unsealing of the FBI’s complaint against the former Maryland residents. With his wife’s help, the FBI said, Jonathan Toebbe arranged a series of dead drops with people he believed to be foreign government officials but who were really FBI agents.
The country Toebee thought he was dealing with tipped off the FBI after Toebbe made overtures about selling nuclear secrets he had obtained, or planned to obtain, from government facilities where he worked. The federal government never revealed which foreign country alerted the U.S. about Toebbe’s outreach.
Jonathan Toebbe held a top secret clearance from the Navy and a Q clearance form the Department of Energy and had worked for the federal government since 2012, the FBI said in court documents after bringing him in.
While at work, Toebbe hoarded classified documents and drawings, including “technical details, operations manuals, and performance reports” while assigned to the Navy’s Reactor Engineering Division and to the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania: a facility outside of Pittsburgh managed by Fluor Marine Propulsion for the National Security Administration under a Naval Nuclear Laboratory contract slated to run at least through Sept. 30, 2023.
