A US Navy nuclear engineer and his wife entered new guilty pleas Tuesday in a case involving an alleged plot to sell secrets about nuclear-powered warships, a month after their previous plea agreements that had called for specific sentencing guidelines were rejected. Jonathan and Diana Toebbe of Annapolis, Maryland, pleaded guilty in federal court in Martinsburg, West Virginia, to one felony count each of conspiracy to communicate restricted data, the AP reports. US District Judge Gina Groh last month rejected the couple's initial pleas to the same charges, saying the sentencing options were “strikingly deficient” considering the seriousness of the case. The couple then immediately withdrew their initial guilty pleas and Groh set trial for January.
The previous sentencing range agreed to by lawyers for Jonathan Toebbe had called for a potential punishment between roughly 12 years and 17 years in prison. Prosecutors said Tuesday that such a sentence would be one of the most significant imposed in modern times under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. Prosecutors also sought three years for Diana Toebbe. Under the latest plea agreement entered Tuesday before US Magistrate Judge Robert Trumble, the couple would each face a maximum sentence of life in prison and a $100,000 fine, although prosecutors are asking for a sentence for Diana Toebbe at the lowest end of the guideline range. If the court doesn't accept the latest agreement, the defendants would again have the right to withdraw their guilty pleas.
Prosecutors said Jonathan Toebbe, 43, abused his access to top-secret government information and repeatedly sold details about the design elements and performance characteristics of Virginia-class submarines to someone he believed was a representative of a foreign government but who was actually an undercover FBI agent. Diana Toebbe, 46, who was teaching at a private school in Maryland at the time of the couple's arrest last October, was accused of acting as a lookout at several prearranged “dead-drop” locations at which memory cards containing the secret information were left behind. None of the information was classified as top secret or secret, falling into a third category considered confidential, according to previous testimony.
(More
submarine stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
