I'm not really sure criminal charges were necessary in Lavarello's case. I would guess that there was an extensive investigation because the FBI was worried about possible espionage. When it turned out that this was just someone who was incredibly cavalier about following the rules, they had done all this investigating and wanted to charge her with something.
From the CNN link provided by Para:
Lavarello was working on a classified thesis at the time [that classified docs were found in her Paris apartment during a dinner party], her lawyer Birney Bervar told CNN. She had been encouraged to pursue the thesis and been working on it at the embassy’s secure information facility until Covid-19 shut things down earlier that year, her lawyer said. The documents she took home were three other classified theses, her lawyer told CNN, and she had no intention of transmitting the classified information or of harming the United States.
Lavarello was confronted about the documents that night, according to her plea agreement, but she did not take steps that night to return them to the embassy’s secure information facility. With the help of one of the dinner party guests, she returned the documents to a safe in the embassy two days later, the court filings said, but she did not return the documents to the secure information facility as she had said at the time that she would do.
She was terminated from her temporary assignment that month because of her mishandling of the documents. In her plea agreement, Lavarello also admitted to transporting from the Philippines to Hawaii later that month a notebook containing classified information. The notebook were handwritten notes from a meeting that were later classified, her lawyer told CNN. According to the court documents, she kept that notebook at her residence, which was not an authorized location for storing classified information. The notebook was later found at her workspace in Honolulu after a search warrant was executed, according to the court filings.
Sounds deliberate and egregious to me.
Sure, but I get nervous about the tendency to criminalize violations of rules and procedures. The government classifies huge amounts of material, the vast majority of which wouldn't really be of any use to anybody other than academics. I guess there's no way to know what kind of information was in these theses, but I strongly suspect it was stuff about US diplomacy 30 years ago or something. Of course, she should have been fired, but I'm just not sure about the need for criminal charges.
The notebook seems like the kind of thing that would turn up on half the desks of people working in the state department if they did extensive searches. You go to some meeting, it isn't labeled as classified, and then two weeks later you get some email about how it is classified now and it gets lost in your inbox and you forget you were supposed to tear out the notes and put them in a secure place. I'm sure it happens almost constantly.
