A former Senate Intelligence Committee employee was sentenced on Thursday to two months in prison for lying to federal law enforcement agents about unauthorized contact he had with a reporter during a federal leak investigation, reports the New York Times. James Wolfe, 58, pleaded guilty in October to one count of making a false statement to the FBI during an interview last December, when he denied that he had been in contact with reporters whose work was the focus of the leak probe. His prison time will be followed by four months of supervised release, during which he must complete 20 hours of community service per month. Federal judge Ketanji Brown Jackson also ordered him to pay a $7,500 fine. Wolfe was the Senate Intelligence Committee’s security director for 28 years. He was in charge of receiving, maintaining and managing classified national security information provided to the committee by the executive branch.
Wolfe was responsible for training committee staff on its policy regarding the news media, which prohibited employees from speaking to journalists unless they were authorized to do so by the chairman or vice chairman of the committee. The FBI interviewed Wolfe as part of an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified national security information that appeared in an article in a national news organization. Wolfe’s arrest brought to light that he had been in a relationship for more than three years with journalist Ali Watkins while she worked at HuffPost, BuzzFeed News and Politico. She is now a reporter for the New York Times. During the investigation, investigators secretly seized years of Watkins’s phone and email records without giving notice to the news organizations that employed her, as Justice Department guidelines generally require.