Four years ago, the Trump administration DOJ prosecuted this fellow and he got 9 years in prison:
A former National Security Agency contractor who pleaded guilty to stealing vast troves of classified material over the course of two decades has been sentenced to nine years in prison.
Harold Martin III, 54, apologized before U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett handed down the sentence on Friday.
“My methods were wrong, illegal and highly questionable,” Martin told the court in Baltimore, according to The Associated Press.
Earlier this year, he pleaded guilty to “willful retention of national defense information,” a crime that carries a punishment of anywhere from no jail time to a maximum prison sentence of 10 years. His plea agreement called for a sentence of nine years in prison.
Martin, who at the time worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, began to accumulate classified documents in his vehicle and at his home in Glen Burnie, Md., in the late 1990s. The Navy veteran held a Top Secret security clearance. He was arrested in August 2016, and the documents were found when the FBI searched his residence.
Shortly after his arrest, Martin’s defense lawyers said that he took documents home to study for his job. But as NPR’s Carrie Johnson reported, “they say somewhere along the line that turned into some kind of bizarre compulsion, some kind of hoarding. … And Martin wound up taking home so much stuff, he couldn’t even absorb it all.” His lawyers have also said hoarding was “a part of a mental health issue,” as Johnson reported.
The DOJ showed no mercy. This fellow didn’t give any of these documents to anyone or show them to anyone. He just collected them and kept them in unsecure places.
But he wasn’t an important political figure so he deserved I guess. According to Republicans, Trump shouldn’t be held to that standard because he’s a former president and it will make his followers unhappy. That’s what they call “the rule of law.”