Donald Keyser,63, a longtime high-ranking official at the State Department , was sentenced to just over a year in jail January 22 for keeping thousands of classified documents at his home and for lying about his personal relationship with a younger Taiwanese diplomat.
In late 2005, the former deputy chief of the State Department's East Asian and Pacific Affairs Burea, pleaded guilty to three felony charges stemming from an investigation into his contacts with the Taiwanese agent, Isabelle Cheng, who is in her 30s.
Judge Thomas Ellis of Alexandria, Va., ordered Keyser to spend a year and a day in jail and two years on supervised release, and to pay a fine of $25,000.
As part of the plea deal, Keyser also admitted that he had more than 3,000 classified documents at his home, some of them marked "top secret." He said he didn't realize that the documents were at his house as a result of a series of office moves, but he acknowledged that he failed to act when his wife, who is a top intelligence official, told him some of the records were classified. (Source: Josh Gerstein, The New York Sun, Jan 23 2007)