Journalism of Courage
The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia Tuesday sent Ashley Tellis, an Indian-origin foreign policy expert arrested last weekend under charges of illegally storing sensitive government records, to home confinement, the Washington Post reported.
The court ordered Tellis to comply with its directions while in detention, where he will be locally monitored.
Federal agents found more than 1,000 pages of “secret and top secret level” documents at the basement of his home in Vienna, Virginia, according to a statement by the US Department of Justice.
According to court filings, surveillance footage showed Tellis leaving several federal buildings, including a State Department office, carrying a briefcase that investigators believe contained the printed materials. Following the findings, federal prosecutors charged him with one count of retaining national defense information, the Post noted.
“The charges as alleged in this case represent a grave risk to the safety and security of our citizens,” Lindsey Halligan, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement during Tellis’ arrest.
Tellis’s attorneys, at a federal court hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, also denied any transmission of classified records. “The sole charge against him involves the unlawful retention of national defense information — not its dissemination,” the attorneys wrote.
“There is no allegation, let alone evidence, that Dr. Tellis ever shared, attempted to share, or intended to share national defense information with unauthorized individuals,” they stated.
As per the report, a federal magistrate judge granted a joint request from prosecutors and Tellis’s attorneys for home confinement pending trial. Tellis had been in jail since his arrest on October 11.
“For those entrusted with our country’s most sensitive information, protecting it is a privilege and solemn responsibility,” the Post quoted Sue J. Bai, a top prosecutor’s statement in the Justice Department’s National Security Division on Tuesday.
“With the hard work and dedication of our prosecutors and agents, we will hold this defendant accountable for breaching that trust and exploiting his security clearance to unlawfully retain classified information detailing our military capabilities,” Bai added.
Tellis will be meeting for the first time with prosecutors and FBI officials on November 4 to discuss “possible resolutions of the case, including any potential resolution prior to indictment,” according to court records.
US District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema agreed to extend to two months the usual one-month deadline to obtain an indictment after an arrest as negotiations continue, the Washington Post reported quoting a court order.
The 64-year-old policy expert has long worked at the very highest levels of the US government, including as an (unpaid) adviser to the US State Department, and a contractor in Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. During the Bush years, Tellis was intimately involved in negotiating the civil nuclear agreement with India.
