High-Ranking Air Force Officer Admits To Taking Highly Sensitive Classified Material, Storing At Home: Report

Federal investigators were reportedly able to obtain confessions from a senior officer of the United States Air Force that he illegally kept classified material in his Florida home.

Robert Birchum was a lieutenant-colonel who retired from the Air Force in 2018, after having worked at the Joint Special Operations Command, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Daily Beast reported Federal law enforcement officials were alerted in 2017 to the fact that he owned a flash drive at home that contained classified information that, if released. “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.”

Investigators discovered 135 classified files in his home marked Top Secret/ACCM (Alternative Compensatory Counter Measures), Secret and/or Confidential. Investigators also found 117 additional classified files on his personal hard drive, which he had kept while deployed overseas, and 28 classified papers in a storage facility.

The report said that the plea agreement was signed just on August 26, 2022, just weeks after former President Donald Trump was raided at Mar-a-Lago in an investigation into Trump’s handling of classified information. Birchum, who admitted to willful retention for national defense information, now faces a decade in prison.

In a few weeks, he will make his first court appearance. He has not yet been given a date for his sentencing.

According to court documents, some of the classified material Birchum kept at his home was revealed in court documents. “concerned Department of Defense locations throughout the world, detailed explanations of the Air Force’s capabilities and vulnerabilities, and, among other things, the methods by which the Air Force gathers, transmits, and uses information observed by various Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) platforms.”

Cedric Lighton, a retired Air Force colonel that worked at the NSA (USSOCOM), stated that the information Birchum and he deal with is so sensitive that it is classified at a level higher than the Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented (TS/SCI).

“Much of the intelligence and operational information of these commands is within SAP (Special Access Program) channels, which means the handling requirements for this information are much stricter than they are for TS/SCI,” Leighton stated. “I noted with concern that he had briefing slides in his possession that detailed NSA’s special collection capabilities. I used to work with those. Revealing them could potentially cause grave damage to our capability to execute military operations and collect information vital to our national security.”

After classified material was discovered at Joe Biden’s home and private office, President Joe Biden is now under investigation. News broke last week that a lawyer for former Vice President Mike Pence found classified material at Pence’s home which was subsequently handed over to federal officials.