CIA Analyst's Plea Deal Adds Further Intrigue To Espionage Act Prosecution

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In an Espionage Act prosecution shrouded in a remarkable level of secrecy, CIA analyst Asif Rahman pled guilty to violating two counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information.

The plea agreement [PDF] announced by the U.S. Justice Department on January 17 reveals that Rahman admitted to previously unknown incidents of disclosing classified information. Yet far from illuminating what happened, Rahman's plea raises more questions than answers.

Rahman will be formally sentenced on May 15. He was the source of two documents about an Israeli strike on Iran that were published by "Middle East Spectator" in October 2024. 

After Rahman was identified as the source, the CIA analyst was arrested in Cambodia where he was stationed at the United States embassy. Rahman was taken to the U.S. territory of Guam, where he had his first court appearance before being transferred to the Eastern District of Virginia—the judicial district well-known for these types of national security cases.

On October 17, 2024, Middle East Spectator, a Telegram channel and Twitter account, posted two classified documents from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The documents dealt with Israel’s military capabilities and its planned strike on Iran.

Middle East Spectator initially described the documents as an exclusive coming from “one of our sources in the U.S. intelligence community.” The accounts later clarified that they had no knowledge of their origin and that they had been posted in another Telegram channel. Nine days later, Israel carried out strikes on Iran, Syria, and Iraq. 

According to the Justice Department’s court filings, the documents had been printed and photographed. They were altered to avoid the government identifying who printed them. After the government determined that the documents were authentic, they were still able to identify the source. 

Thanks to a government application, every time the documents were accessed a unique URL was assigned. The system logged the user who accessed them. The government claims only one individual accessed and printed the documents in the format they were published online—Asif Rahman.

In December, Magistrate Judge Ivan D. Davis, a former public defender, initially ordered Rahman to be released if he was able to meet certain conditions to prevent him from fleeing or disclosing classified information. The government appealed this decision.

District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles, a career prosecutor, reversed the decision a week later and ordered Rahman to be detained before trial. Rahman appealed Giles’ decision to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ultimately upheld Rahman’s pretrial detention.

Rahman also took an extremely unusual move for an Espionage Act defendant. He asserted his rights for a speedy trial and fought the government’s move to certify the case as complex under the Speedy Trial Act. Giles ruled in favor of the government, preventing Rahman from going to trial in February.  

Avoiding Trial Like Similar Espionage Act Defendants

Like most Espionage Act cases, Rahman’s ended in a plea agreement. 

The defense admitted in the statement of facts [PDF] agreed to with the government that he was the source of the two NGA documents posted to social media, and also that he had committed previously unmentioned violations of the Espionage Act.

According to the statement of facts, in the spring of last year, Rahman removed five documents classified as secret and top secret in his backpack. 

Once he took these documents home, Rahman altered them “to conceal their source and his identity.” He apparently communicated information that he learned from the documents to “individuals he knew were not entitled to receive it” and provided unnamed individuals with reproductions of the documents. After doing so, he deleted the copies of the documents from his hard drive and returned the physical print outs to his workplace where he shredded them.

In autumn of last year, Rahman again removed documents in his backpack. This time he took home ten documents classified as top secret. Like during the previous incident, Rahman communicated about their contents and provided reproductions to unnamed people. He deleted the copies from his hard drive and shredded the printouts after returning them to his workplace.

The statement of facts makes clear that this instance was separate from the two documents Rahman printed in October, which were eventually published by Middle East Spectator. 

Rahman removed those documents on October 17, less than a day after they were created. He then shared them with multiple individuals not entitled to receive them. On October 18, one of those individuals confirmed to Rahman in writing they had “further distributed [the two documents] to other individuals.” That same day they were published by Middle East Spectator. 

Mystery surrounds Rahman's additional disclosures. While the NGA documents are referred to as covering an allied nation’s “kinetic action,” the topics of earlier documents and to whom Rahman disclosed them to is not even vaguely hinted at in the statement of facts. It is also unclear who Rahman initially received the NGA documents.

And the biggest question of all remains: why did Rahman leak this information? 

The government has repeatedly claimed that Rahman’s disclosure caused Israel to delay its military strike on Iran. During a December 11, 2025 hearing prosecutors claimed Rahman was ideologically motivated. However, the government admitted it had no direct evidence of ideological motives. Prosecutors merely suggested he was ideological because they had ruled out other motives, such as money, considered the nature of the leaks, and factored in the location where the files were published. 

Thus, the government insisted there must be an ideological motive. But Giles was unpersuaded. 

Potentially Facing One Of The Longest Sentences—And Under SAMs

As part of the plea agreement, Rahman was granted immunity in the Eastern District for prosecution for any crimes mentioned in the statement of facts. He also agreed to cooperate with the government by providing any information it requests about criminal activity, including as part of a grand jury or polygraph examination.  

The plea agreement itself contains a troubling clause. Rahman agreed to notify the government of any contact with the media that he intends to have, including in person conversations, emails, telephone calls, or through the mail, so that "representatives of the intelligence community may be present to monitor the information being disseminated, and, if necessary to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of information." 

It is unclear why this was included. Such a clause was not part of recent plea agreements in §793 cases, including journalist Julian Assange, Discord leaker Jack Teixeira, and whistleblowers Reality Winner and Terry Albury. It was, however, featured in a plea agreement for an accused Chinese spy indicted under §794 of the Espionage Act, which covers giving national defense information to a foreign government. 

On May 15, the court will sentence Rahman. In the run up to this hearing, the U.S. Probation Services will prepare a Presentence Investigation Report. Both the defense and the prosecution will file motions explaining why they agree or disagree with the sentencing recommendations of the report. At sentencing, Rahman will have a chance to speak on his own behalf

Rahman, according to the plea agreement, will likely face a prison sentence between 63 and 78 months. If sentenced to this amount of time in prison, it would be one of the longer sentences issued against a similarly situated defendant.

As part of the plea deal, Rahman acknowledged that he was a national security defendant who may be subject to “Special Administrative Measures” or SAMs— harsh conditions of confinement designed to curtail a prisoner’s ability to communicate with others. 

While motives are legally considered irrelevant when determining whether a defendant violated the Espionage Act, they often come into play during sentencing. The government in arguing for a severe sentence will portray Rahman's actions in the worst light possible. The defense may counter by asserting that Rahman acted out of a sense of responsibility to the public.

If any phase of Rahman’s legal proceedings is likely to enlighten the public as to why he disclosed the information, it will be during this hearing. But for now, the case against Rahman will remain one of the strangest Espionage Act prosecutions.