Retired US Army officer sentenced to nearly 6 years for sharing classified info on dating site
LINCOLN, Neb. — LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — 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 the war between Russia and Ukraine to 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 one count of conspiracy to disclose national defense information, was also fined $25,000 and sentenced to a year of supervision upon his release from prison. In exchange for his guilty plea, two other charges were dropped.
Slater had a top secret clearance for his work at U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska after retiring from the Army as a lieutenant colonel in 2020. Prosecutors said that as part of his job, which he held from approximately August 2021 to April 2022, Slater attended briefings on the Russo-Ukrainian War that were classified top secret. He was arrested in March 2024.
In his plea agreement, Slater admitted that he conspired to transmit classified information he learned during these briefings through the messaging platform of a foreign dating site to an unnamed co-conspirator, who claimed to be a woman living in Ukraine. The information, classified as secret, concerned Russian military targets and military capabilities, according to the plea agreement.
According to the original indictment, the co-conspirator regularly asked Slater for classified information. She called him, “my secret informant, my love!” in a single message. She closed another by saying: “You are my secret agent. With love.” In another, she wrote: “Dave, I hope that tomorrow NATO will prepare a very pleasant ‘surprise’ for (Russian President Vladimir) Putin! Will you tell me?”
Court documents do not identify the co-conspirator, nor indicate whether she worked for Ukraine or Russia. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Friday that the office could not provide that information.
