LINCOLN, Nebraska — LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — A retired Army officer who worked as a civilian in the Air Force has been sentenced to nearly six years in prison for conspiring to transmit classified information about Russia's war with Ukraine on a foreign online dating platform.
David Slater was sentenced Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Lincoln to 70 months in prison. Slater, who was 64 years old when he pleaded guilty was also fined $25,000 in July on a charge of conspiracy to disclose national defense information and sentenced to a year of post-prison supervision. In exchange for his guilty plea, two other charges were dropped.
Slater had a top secret clearance at his job at U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska after leaving the Army as a lieutenant colonel in 2020. Prosecutors said that as part of his job, which he held from August 2021 until about April 2022, Slater attended briefings about the Russian-Ukrainian war that were classified as top secret. He was arrested in March 2024.
In his plea agreement, Slater admitted that he conspired to transmit classified information he learned from these briefings through the messaging platform of an overseas dating site to an unnamed co-conspirator who claimed to be a woman living in Ukraine. According to the plea agreement, the information classified as classified related to Russian military facilities and military capabilities.
According to the original indictment, the co-conspirator regularly requested classified information from Slater. She called him “my secret informant love!” in one message. She closed the other with the words: “You are my secret agent. With love”. In another, she wrote: “Dave, I hope that tomorrow NATO will prepare a very nice “surprise” for (Russian President Vladimir) Putin! Can you tell me?”
Court documents do not identify the accomplice or indicate whether she worked for Ukraine or Russia. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office said Friday that prosecutors could not provide such information.
