Have you heard about the guy who took lots of highly classified documents from work and kept them at home, putting the country’s national security at serious risk?
Yes, this is why President Donald Trump turned himself in for arrest on Tuesday. He pleaded not guilty to 37 felony counts related to his efforts to keep and then hide top-secret documents from federal authorities at Mar-a-Lago, his residence and social club in Florida.
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But while Trump was president, a much lower-profile government employee did something similar. Nghia Pho, a software developer at the National Security Agency, took “ for others who might consider mishandling sensitive information.
Pho, now in prison, arguably did less damage to national security than Trump. Unlike the former president, the ex-NSA worker doesn’t appear to have lost any sensitive documents. When FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago last year, their search turned up 48 folders with classified markings that were empty. Beyond that, Pho was keeping documents at his private residence, not at a social club with more than 150 staffers, 500 members and a history of allowing suspicious foreign nationals to gain entrance.
Pho also didn’t lie to federal law enforcement officials about what he had done and worked with them to remedy the situation. Trump, meanwhile, knowingly took classified documents to an unsafe space, tried to conceal what he had done and prevented government agents from retrieving them.
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Rogers was originally appointed to his post, which oversees the nation’s cyber intelligence and cybersecurity efforts, under former President Barack Obama. Trump kept him on until Rogers retired from the Navy in 2018.
The former NSA director did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment on how he would compare the gravity of Pho’s actions to Trump’s or how severely he thinks the former president should be punished for compromising the country’s national security if he’s convicted.
The admiral was clear in his 2018 letter, though, about the serious risks of bringing intelligence community documents into your private home:
“The protection of classified information is an essential responsibility of all those working within the Intelligence Community, as the exposure of the United States’ classified information outside of secure spaces may result in the destruction of intelligence-gathering efforts used to protect this nation.”
