A former CIA agent has been sentenced to 42 months in prison for leaking information.
Jeffrey Sterling, 47, was sentenced to 42 months in prison Monday for leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen in 2003. Risen was writing a book at the time detailing a botched plan by the U.S. government to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
Sterling was convicted in federal court in January of nine counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information. He was also found guilty of obstructing justice.
“For his own vindictive purposes, Jeffrey Sterling carelessly disclosed extremely valuable, highly classified information that he had taken an oath to keep secret,” U.S. attorney Dana Boente said in a statement. “His attempt to leverage national security information for his own malicious reasons brought him to this sentence today.”
Sterling, who worked for 19 years at the CIA, was suspected of giving the information to Risen as retaliation for his firing and an unsuccessful lawsuit against the agency for racial discrimination.
