Top U.S. Justice Department officials are worried that Asif William Rahman, a former CIA analyst who leaked reports about Israel’s plans for a strike on Iran, isn’t going to get a harsh enough sentence.
That’s why, his defense lawyers said, the government is making an “unprecedented” request for Rahman to get a sentence 50 percent longer than the high end of what guidelines recommend — despite his cooperation with prosecutors.
Prosecutors asked that Rahman get three years more than the five to six-year guideline because his leaks “could have” harmed national security. In doing so, they claimed in court that he used technical wizardry to cover his tracks, but a review by The Intercept suggests that he employed typical hobbyist apps.
Rahman’s lawyers, meanwhile, asked for the judge to reject the government’s request. They say Rahman was acting under the stress of a traumatic tour of duty in Iraq, personal tragedy, and a desire to advance peace in the Middle East. They say classified documents filed under seal provide no evidence that his leaks hurt U.S. interests.
“The government’s request for an upward variance in this case is unprecedented and contrary to the parties’ understanding of how both the government and Mr. Rahman would benefit from an early plea with full cooperation,” they said. “It is also a violation of the law, as it relies substantially on information that Mr. Rahman provided in the course of his cooperation. For these reasons, and to uphold the rule of law, the Court should disregard this belated, unlawful, and unjust recommendation.”
The dueling briefs filed in federal court over the past month offer deeper insight into the motivations of Rahman, whose leaks may have briefly delayed Israel’s strike on Iran, while highlighting high-level interest in the case from Donald Trump’s administration.
Rahman’s leaks briefly drew global attention last year during escalating attacks between Israel and Iran tied to the Gaza war.
The leaks of analyses of satellite photos of Israel’s preparations for a strike on Iran surfaced on social media in October. Prosecutors would later claim that they delayed Israel’s “kinetic action” against its rival in the Middle East.
High-Level Pressure on Sentence
Rahman began cooperating with prosecutors after his November arrest while stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia.
His lawyers said he submitted to three daylong debriefings intended to help the government avoid future “insider threats.” He has also forked over the passwords for his encrypted devices.
Rahman pleaded guilty on January 17, with an understanding from federal prosecutors in the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia that both sides would agree that federal sentencing guidelines recommend a term of roughly five to six years.
Then Trump came into office — and the understanding between the government and defense began to collapse. CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis, a Trump appointee known for his loyalty to the president, wrote a letter to the court dated May 1 making serious allegations about fallout from the leaks.
“At an unclassified level, I can confirm that Mr. Rahman’s unauthorized disclosures have caused serious, and in some instance exceptionally grave, damage to U.S. national security and the CIA,” he wrote. More information was included in a classified appendix, he said.
Prosecutors followed that letter up with a brief where they asked U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles to go well above the guideline’s upper range of 6.5 years.
The prosecutors on the case, however, stopped short of echoing the farfetched claims of harm from Ellis. Instead, they said that sealed filings in the case “detail the catastrophic harms that could have occurred because of the defendant’s actions.”
Defense lawyers soon cried foul. They said it was “unprecedented” for prosecutors to seek such a sharp upward variance on a sentence after agreeing to what would be the guideline range under federal law. In violation of the plea agreement, the government’s request relied on information that Rahman himself had offered to investigators, they added.
The request was not prompted by local prosecutors, they claimed. Instead, defense lawyers blamed “Main Justice” — referring to the Justice Department’s headquarters — for directing local lawyers to take the hard-nosed position. They also said there was nothing in the classified documents backing up Ellis’s claim of actual harm.
Source: U.S. Sentencing Memorandum
Fortified?
Prosecutors have separately played up Rahman’s supposed technical sophistication, pointing to a handwritten list of apps they found at his residence in Cambodia. Those apps, the government says, were “all intended to fortify Android electronic devices against interception and discovery.”
Yet at a minimum, the government’s claims appear to be significantly overstated, according to an Intercept analysis. The apps Rahman listed were the type that might appeal to anyone with an interest in playing around with the inner workings of their phone settings, as opposed to someone hellbent on fortifying their device.
The list of 12 apps include an ad blocker, a password manager, a VPN, a secure messaging app, a task automation app, and a firewall — in other words, basic consumer apps which people who want a way to manage their passwords, or who don’t want to see ads, routinely have on their phones.
The remainder of the itemized apps include an alternate Android operating system, LineageOS, which facilitates device customization, and various other tweaking apps popular in hobbyist circles of people that modify Android phones.
None of the listed apps appear to be explicitly intended to “fortify Android electronic devices against interception and discovery.”
The government also noted that the listed apps, which include the encrypted messaging service Signal, were “outside of any government-suggested platforms.”
As the Yemen strike messaging scandal revealed, the Signal app is routinely used by government agencies, including the CIA.
“Genuine Remorse”
Since his arrest, Rahman has taken a penitent stance, expressing what his lawyers call “genuine remorse” while cooperating with government investigators.
The defense has requested a sentence of 13 months, which, with time already served, would mean that Rahman spends about half a year more behind bars.
Rahman’s defense attorneys say the Yale University graduate’s record at the CIA was spotless. They say that during his tenure, he had encountered “significant risk to his personal safety and security” while on a one-year posting in Baghdad.
Before he was about to ship off to another assignment in Cambodia, Rahman’s family suffered a major loss. Coupled with Israel’s war on Gaza, the loss “revived his traumatic experiences in Iraq,” according to Rahman’s attorneys.
The spiraling personal and geopolitical crises gave Rahman “the irrational sense that he must take steps to mitigate the potential harm to U.S. interests and somehow help advance the interests of peace,” his lawyers said.
Rahman also wrote a personal letter to Giles, the federal judge, who was appointed by Joe Biden.
“It is hard to see now,” Rahman wrote, “how I could have seen this then, but when I committed my offenses I thought they would help protect Americans and American interests.”
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