On May 2, 2012, nine days before Sachtleben was arrested in Indiana on child pornography charges, Sachtleben knowingly and willfully disclosed national defense information to a reporter for a national news organization not entitled to receive it.
Sachtleben has admitted that he had reason to believe that this information could be used to the injury of the United States and to the advantage of a foreign nation.
During his career, he was a special agent bomb technician and was assigned to work on many major cases involving terrorist attacks. In his work as an FBI employee, Sachtleben held a top secret security clearance and had regular access to classified and national defense information relating to the FBI’s activities, as well as the activities of other members of the U.S. intelligence community.
As a contractor, he routinely visited the FBI Lab in Quantico, Virginia.
One of the criminal charges addressed Sachtleben’s contacts with the reporter relating to the disruption of a plot to conduct a suicide bomb attack on a U.S.-bound airliner by the Yemen-based terrorist organization al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the recovery by the United States of a bomb in connection with that plot.
that lines up a little too much