Retired U.S. Army officer sentenced to nearly 6 years for sharing classified info on dating site

A person holds a cellphone in this undated image. (Greta Hoffman/Pexels.com)

LINCOLN, Neb. — A retired Army officer who worked as a civilian for 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 when he pleaded guilty in July to a count of conspiracy to disclose national defence information, was also fined US$25,000 and ordered to undergo a year of supervision upon his release from prison. In exchange for his guilty plea, two other counts were dropped.

Slater had top secret clearance at his job at the U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska after retiring from the Army as a lieutenant colonel in 2020. Prosecutors said as part of his job, which he held from August 2021 until around April 2022, Slater attended briefings about the Russia-Ukraine war that were classified up to top secret. He was arrested in March of 2024.

In his plea agreement, Slater acknowledged that he conspired to transmit classified information that he learned from those briefings via a foreign dating website’s messaging platform to an unnamed co-conspirator, who claimed to be a woman living in Ukraine. The information, classified as secret, pertained to military targets and Russian military capabilities, according to the plea agreement.

According to the original indictment, the coconspirator regularly asked Slater for classified information. She called him, “my secret informant love!” in one message. She closed another by saying, “You are my secret agent. With love.” In another, she wrote, “Dave, I hope tomorrow NATO will prepare a very pleasant ‘surprise’ for (Russian President Vladimir) Putin! Will you tell me?”

Court documents don’t identify the coconspirator, or say whether she was working for Ukraine or Russia. A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office Friday said the office cannot provide that information.

The Associated Press