A Maryland woman pleaded guilty to illegally accessing a Drug Enforcement Administration database of open cases and passed information she found there on to her lover and his drug-dealing friend, disrupting a federal investigation.
Tanya Perry was a data entry contract employee for the DEA, court documents said. In that role, she had access to the Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System, a national database of open drug investigations. In 2004 and 2005, the 30-year-old Waldorf resident accessed the database and provided details of a DEA investigation into her boyfriend and his friend Jesse Johnson, she admitted Tuesday as part of her guilty plea.
In August 2004, Johnson told a DEA informant that he knew about an ongoing investigation into him and the Global Positioning System device the agency had installed on his car, Perry admitted.
“Because the investigation of Johnson had been compromised … law enforcement decided to prematurely take overt investigative steps,” court documents said. On Sept. 20, 2004, investigators searched two locations used by Johnson for his drug dealing business. Inside, they found a gun, more than $56,000 in cash, two digital scales and other items that showed Johnson had sold at least 17 pounds of cocaine, according to court documents.
Four days after the search warrants were executed, Perry again accessed the database, querying information on Johnson and her boyfriend, she admitted. At the time, her boyfriend was unknown to law enforcement.
Johnson was convicted and is serving a 10-year sentence in prison. But “no other members of the drug organization were arrested or prosecuted,” as a result of Perry’s actions, prosecutors wrote in court documents.
Perry, who court documents say had undergone a background check before being employed, had signed a DEA non-disclosure form saying she would not release information regarding investigations that could “result in the impairment of national security, place human life in jeopardy … or prevent the DEA from effectively discharging its responsibilities.”
Perry faces up to five years in prison when she’s sentenced Feb. 1.
