A former Army officer who held a top-secret security clearance in his post-retirement job with the U.S. Strategic Command pleaded guilty last week to passing classified information about Russia’s war with Ukraine through an online dating platform.
Retired Army Lt. Col. David Franklin Slater, 64, pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiring to transmit classified information before a federal magistrate judge in Omaha, Nebraska. In exchange for his guilty plea, two other counts were dropped.
Slater was working as a civilian at Strategic Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska in February 2022 when he began communicating with a woman believed to be living in Ukraine, Justice Department officials said in their indictment against him.
“During this time, [the woman] asked David Franklin Slater to provide her with sensitive, non-public, closely held, and classified [national defense information], to which [he] had access as a result of his