LINCOLN, NEBRASKA — LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — A retired Army officer who served as a civilian in the Air Force has been sentenced to nearly six years in prison for conspiring to transmit classified information about… Russia’s war with Ukraine On a foreign online dating platform.
David Slater was sentenced Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Lincoln to 70 months in prison. Slater, who was 64 years old when he… plead guilty In July, on charges of conspiring to disclose national defense information, he was also fined $25,000 and ordered to undergo a year’s probation upon his release from prison. In exchange for his guilty plea, two other charges were dropped.
Slater held a top-secret clearance at his job at U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska after retiring from the Army as a lieutenant colonel in 2020. Prosecutors said that as part of his job, which he held from approximately August 2021 through April 2022, Slater attended briefings on the Russia-Ukraine war that had been classified as top-secret. It was He was arrested in March 2024.
In his plea agreement, Slater admitted that he conspired to transmit confidential information he learned from those briefings over the messaging platform of a foreign dating website to an unnamed co-conspirator, who he claimed was a woman living in Ukraine. The information, classified as classified, relates to Russian military targets and capabilities, according to the plea agreement.
According to the original indictment, the co-conspirator regularly asked Slater for classified information. She called him “my secret detective love!” In one message. Another concluded by saying: “You are my secret agent. With love.” She wrote in another message: “Dave, I hope tomorrow NATO will prepare a very pleasant ‘surprise’ for (Russian President Vladimir) Putin! Can you tell me?”
Court documents do not identify the co-conspirator, nor do they say whether she was working for Ukraine or Russia. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Friday that the office could not provide that information.