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- An FBI employee was charged with keeping classified information in her home for years.
- An FBI official said Kendra Kingsbury, 48, put "her country's sensitive secrets at risk."
- The information included information about US defense strategies and al-Qaeda.
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A federal grand jury indicted a Kansas FBI employee on charges of illegally stashing classified national security documents in her home for more than a decade, according to the Department of Justice.
Kendra Kingsbury, 48, was charged May 18 with two counts of having unauthorized possession of documents relating to the national defense. Kingsbury was arrested and the indictment was unsealed May 21.
Kingsbury served as an intelligence analyst for the agency's Kansas City Division for more than 12 years, and held a top secret security clearance, the indictment said. She was suspended in 2017.
According to the indictment, she worked with numerous "FBI squads" that concentrated on different areas, including counterintelligence and violent gangs.
The indictment alleged that Kingsbury started improperly removing "sensitive" documents and bringing them home in June 2004, and continued to do so up until December 15, 2017.
The eight-page indictment alleged that Kingsbury obtained several documents with confidential information, including ways the US defends "against counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cyber threats." Other documents in her possession included information about al Qaeda and a suspected associate of Osama Bin Laden.
The indictment also said Kingsbury did not have a "need to know" most of the information she found in the documents, and was not granted permission to take any classified documents.
"The breadth and depth of classified national security information retained by the defendant for more than a decade is simply astonishing," the assistant director of the FBI's counterintelligence division, Alan Kohler Jr., said in a statement.