KANSAS CITY – A former FBI analyst who kept hundreds of classified national security documents at her North Kansas City home was sentenced Wednesday to nearly four years in prison.
Kendra Kingsbury, 50, was an intelligence analyst for the FBI for more than a dozen years. She pled guilty on Oct. 13, 2022 to two counts of unlawfully retaining documents related to the national defense.
Court documents reveal Kingsbury improperly removed and unlawfully kept 386 classified documents in an electronic format on hard drives, compact discs, and other storage media.
The documents included "numerous documents classified at the SECRET level from the FBI that describe intelligence sources and methods related to U.S. government efforts related to counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and defending against cyber threats," a DOJ news release states.
Some documents included information about al Qaeda members in Africa, one of which was an associate of Osama bin Laden.
The information she took included documents classified at the secret level, some of which included U.S. efforts related to counterterrorism, details on specific FBI investigations, and sensitive operations in national security investigations and the FBI's technical capabilities, the release said.
She also kept documents from another government agency that described intelligence sources and methods related to efforts to collect intelligence on terrorist groups, as well information on activities of emerging terrorists, federal prosecutors said.
An investigation into how Kingsbury may have used the documents “revealed more questions and concerns than answers,” according to the release. The investigation found that a number of suspicious calls to and from numbers associated with counterterrorism investigations, the release said, but Kingsbury has declined to say why she contacted those individuals.