WASHINGTON _ A former FBI agent in Minneapolis who says he was angry about racial targeting by the agency has pleaded guilty to leaking classified documents to a news organization.
Terry Albury, 39, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to two charges of revealing national defense information and, under sentencing guidelines, is expected to serve three or four years in prison.
"Today, Terry Albury admitted to violating his oath to protect our country by disclosing to a reporter classified information that, as an FBI agent, he was entrusted to protect," said Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers.
Albury, who did a stint working for the FBI in Iraq, had a top secret clearance for his assignment as a liaison with Customs and Border Protection at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Beginning in 2016, he began to take records, cutting and pasting some documents to avoid detection and, for others, taking pictures of his computer screen. The date on one document listed in the charges matches one published by The Intercept, a news website, as part of a series on FBI practices.
According to a search warrant obtained by Minnesota Public Radio, the FBI began an investigation after journalists submitted two FOIA requests that listed 27 documents, including 16 that had been classified secret. The bureau reviewed internal records and found that Albury had accessed two thirds of them.
Last August, Attorney General Jeff Sessions promised a crackdown on leakers, saying law enforcement had tripled the number of investigations. In June, a woman working for a government contracting firm in Georgia, Reality Leigh Winner, was charged with leaking a secret document about Russian hacking, also to The Intercept. That case is still pending.
After Albury was charged, the site's editor in chief, Betsy Reed, said the organization does not discuss its anonymous sources, but said the government targeting of people trying to expose wrongdoing was "an outrage."
In a statement, Albury's lawyers, JaneAnne Murray and Joshua Dratel, said he was a whistleblower who was trying to expose wrongdoing in the agency. They said he did not reveal any sources or information about specific operations.
Albury, the only African-American agent in the Minneapolis field office, became disturbed at FBI directives to develop sources, believing that the methods "profiled and intimidated" minority communities, the statement said.
"His conduct in this case was an act of conscience," the lawyers said.
