The former Air Force officer who stole more than 300 classified U.S. defense documents—more than 30 of which were labeled Top Secret—was slapped with a three-year prison sentence on Thursday, according to a press release from the Department of Justice. Robert L. Birchum, a 55-year-old Tampa resident, kept the sensitive docs in his Florida home, his overseas officer’s quarters and a storage pod in his driveway—none of them authorized for storing critical national defense info. Law enforcement discovered that Birchum had knowingly removed these documents in 2017, but it wasn’t until January that his plea agreement was unsealed and first reported by The Daily Beast. According to court documents, the classified material taken by Birchum “concerned Department of Defense locations throughout the world, detailed explanations of the Air Force's capabilities and vulnerabilities, and, among other things, the methods by which the Air Force gathers, transmits, and uses information observed by various Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) platforms.”
