Virginia Class Submarine

The Washington Post reports that a federal judge rejected plea bargains for a Navy engineer and his wife who allegedly tried to sell military secrets, saying the prison terms called for by the deals were too lenient for a couple accused of offering U.S. nuclear submarine data to a foreign government.

Last October, we posted about Navy nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebbe, and his wife, Diana Toebbe, who were arrested after attempting to pass detailed secret information about the US Navy’s Virginia-class submarine reactors to foreign agents. The Toebbes left a 16 GB memory card containing submarine documents and plans, hidden in half of a peanut butter sandwich in a plastic bag at an agreed location in West Virginia. They thought that they were giving the information to a foreign country in exchange for cryptocurrency payments. Instead, the FBI had intercepted their correspondence and impersonated foreign agents.

At the time of their arrest, the identity of the foreign country was not disclosed. The New York Times reported that the Toebbes appeared to believe that soliciting American adversaries like Russia or China was, morally, a bridge too far, according to text messages released in court. Instead, Jonathan and Diana Toebbe thought of a country that was rich enough to buy the secrets, not hostile to the United States and, most importantly, increasingly eager to acquire the very technology they were selling: Brazil.

The plan backfired almost as soon as it began. After Toebbe sent a letter offering the secrets to Brazil’s military intelligence agency in April 2020, Brazilian officials handed the letter over to the F.B.I. legal attaché in the country.

Now, the couple’s plea deal has fallen through as well. In plea bargains with federal prosecutors — signed early this year and initially accepted by a federal magistrate — the couple admitted to violating the Atomic Energy Act. The deals called for Jonathan Toebbe to be sentenced to 12½ to 17½ years in prison, while his wife would get a three-year term. But the couple withdrew their guilty pleas Tuesday after U.S. District Judge Gina M. Groh, in Martinsburg, W.Va., threw out the agreements rather than impose the required sentences.

“It’s not in the best interest of this community or, in fact, this country to accept these plea agreements,” she said from the bench. “I don’t find any justifiable reason for accepting either one of these plea agreements.”

Although she has raised doubts about plea deals in the past, Groh said, “In the end, I generally honor plea agreements negotiated by the parties, even when they have binding [sentencing] ranges” that she does not entirely agree with. In this case, however, “I find the sentencing options available to me to be strikingly deficient,” the judge said.

U.S. Attorney William Ihlenfeld of the Northern District of West Virginia, where the case is being handled, said his office “will move forward” and “be ready” for a trial. “I respect the decision by the Court to reject the plea agreements,” he said in a statement.

Jonathan Toebbe, a nuclear engineer with top-secret security clearance, worked in the Navy’s multibillion-dollar effort to build submarines that can stay submerged and undetected for the longest time possible. His wife, a teacher at the private Key School in Annapolis, was known as a meticulous humanities instructor who had liberal political views and was loved by students. Both come from families with considerable military ties.