A federal judge on Tuesday rejected plea deals for a Navy engineer and his wife who allegedly tried to sell military secrets, saying the prison terms required by the deals were too lenient for a couple accused of offering U.S. nuclear submarine data to a foreign government. Jonathan Toebbe, 43, a Navy civil engineer, and Diana Toebbe, 46, a private school teacher, lived in Annapolis, Md., before they were arrested in October in a case involving an FBI sting and cloak. Details and daggers that seemed straight out of a spy novel, including an attempt to transfer classified submarine data hidden in a peanut butter sandwich, authorities said. In plea bargains with federal prosecutors — signed earlier this year and initially accepted by a federal judge — the pair admitted to violating the Atomic Energy Act. The deals called for Jonathan Toebbe to be sentenced to 12½ to 17½ years in prison, while his wife will be sentenced to three years in prison. But the pair withdrew their guilty pleas Tuesday after U.S. District Judge Gina M. Groh in Martinsburg, N.Va., rejected the deals instead of imposing the required sentences. “It is not in the best interest of this community or, indeed, this country to accept these plea deals,” he said from the bench. “I find no justifiable reason for accepting one of these plea deals.” For nearly an hour before Groh’s surprise decision, two defense attorneys and an assistant U.S. attorney argued, to no avail, that the prison terms called for in the deals were appropriate. The 12½ to 17½-year range for Jonathan Toebbe “is not a slap on the wrist,” his attorney, Nicholas J. Compton, told the judge. “It’s a significant punishment.” Diana Toebbe’s attorney, Barry P. Beck, said a shorter term was appropriate for his client because “that’s not why we’re here today. We’re here because her husband had a bad money-making idea, and she agreed to go with it.” Although she has expressed skepticism about plea deals in the past, Groh said, “In the end, I generally honor plea deals that the parties have negotiated, even when they have binding [sentencing] series’ with which he does not fully agree. In this case, however, “I find the sentencing options available to me to be strikingly deficient,” the judge said. U.S. Attorney William Ihlenfeld of the Northern District of West Virginia, where the case is being handled, said his office “will move forward” and “will be ready” for a trial. “I respect the Court’s decision to reject the plea agreements,” he said in a statement. Defense attorneys, who appeared in Groh’s courtroom for Tuesday’s sentencing hearings and appeared surprised by her decision, did not immediately return messages seeking comment. Jonathan and Diana Toebbe had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to share “restricted data” in violation of the Atomic Energy Act, which carries a possible life sentence. After they withdrew their pleas, the judge set a joint trial date for mid-January. It’s likely that before then, the two sides will negotiate new plea deals with sentences more favorable to Groh. Who Are the Maryland Husbands Who Admitted Trying to Sell Nuclear Submarine Secrets? Jonathan Toebbe, a nuclear engineer with a top-secret security clearance, worked on the Navy’s multibillion-dollar effort to build submarines that can stay submerged and undetected for as long as possible. His wife, a teacher at the private Key School in Annapolis, was known as a thorough humanities teacher who held liberal political views and was beloved by students. Both come from families with significant military connections. Authorities said the Toebbes, who have two children, plotted together to offer to sell government secrets about nuclear propulsion systems on U.S. submarines to an undisclosed foreign country. According to court documents, investigators learned of the scheme when the country forwarded the couple’s offer to US counterintelligence officials. FBI agents posing as representatives of the foreign country quickly launched a sting operation. Agents said they recorded Toebbe and his wife leaving data cards for their alleged handlers at “dead drop” locations within driving distance of their home. The information was hidden inside a peanut butter sandwich, a Band-Aid wrapper and a pack of Dentyne gum, authorities said. In fact, his foreign handler Jonathan Toebbe was an undercover FBI agent. Emails cited in court documents show Toebbe trusted the undercover agent in part because of the money he was being paid and because the FBI arranged to “tag” Toebbe from a foreign country’s embassy in Washington during the Memorial Day weekend. last year. The documents do not describe how the FBI was able to arrange such a signal. In correspondence with his handler, Jonathan Toebbe claimed that he spent years formulating his “spy-for-hire” plan. Overall, officials said, Toebbe provided thousands of pages of documents, and his espionage ambitions had been building for years. Referring to the proposed sentence for Jonathan Toebbe, Groh wondered aloud what might happen if he “gets out early for good [behavior], and the information it still possesses and has access to is still in step with current technology — and it uses it and provides it to another country that gains an advantage over that country.” He said the same about Diana Toebbe. In a victim impact statement filed in court, Vice Admiral William J. Houston, commander of US submarine forces, said the secrets the pair allegedly tried to sell were “some of the most secure and sensitive information about our nuclear fleet. . “ Reading parts of the statement from the bench, Groh said the data represented a “military advantage provided by decades of research and development. This information could provide foreign navies with the opportunity to close the skills gap that would require extraordinary effort and resources to remediate.” At a hearing shortly after the couple’s arrest in October, an FBI agent testified that authorities had searched Toebbe’s home and their computers, but found neither the $100,000 in cryptocurrency paid to the couple by the U.S. government nor thousands of additional pages of classified documents. The FBI says Toebbe stole from his job. It is unclear whether the cryptocurrency or the documents have since been recovered. The couple’s now-revoked plea agreements called for them to cooperate with the FBI in its ongoing investigation.
