Defense intelligence analyst pleads guilty to media leaks of classified materials

A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) counterterrorism analyst on Thursday pleaded guilty to leaking classified information regarding a foreign country’s weapons system to two journalists in 2018 and 2019, according to the Justice Department.

Henry Kyle Frese, 31, will be sentenced June 18 and faces up to 10 years in prison, a department press release said.

“Frese violated the trust placed in him by the American people when he disclosed sensitive national security information for personal gain,” John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security, said.

“He alerted our country’s adversaries to sensitive national defense information, putting the nation’s security at risk,” he added.

The leaked information, which was from five separate classified documents, appeared in eight articles which were all written by the same journalist.

Court filings indicate that Frese and this journalist “lived together at the same residential address from January 2018 to November 2018.” Frese worked for the DIA from February 2018 to October 2019.

The Justice Department’s press release didn’t state the names of the journalists or who they worked for.