It’s okay. He had a good excuse. He was protecting the establishment.
A former FBI analyst was reportedly sentenced on Friday to seven days in jail and a $500 fine after he admitted to accessing the emails of a conservative activist, according to multiple reports.
Mark Tolson, 60, had previously pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge after accessing lobbyist Jack Burkman’s emails.
Burkman accused former special counsel Robert Mueller of sexual assault last year without evidence, according to The Washington Post, which described the lobbyist as a conspiracy theorist.
Tolson told the court that he was trying to protect Mueller.
“I did what I did to try to protect Director Mueller, who can protect himself,” he was quoted as saying in the Post. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“You can’t just rummage through other people’s accounts,” he was told by U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, according to the newspaper.
You actually can’t. It’s quite illegal. Sarah Palin’s hacker was sentenced to a year in prison.
And here’s a somewhat similar case of accessing an account to which the defendant had a password, but no right to use it.
Could someone face prison time for snooping through a spouse’s e-mails?
For Leon Walker of Michigan, the answer was yes.
Suspecting that his wife was involved with another man, and worried that it was affecting their daughter, Walker logged into Clara Walker’s Gmail account last summer.
Walker, 33, said it was easy for him to log in because his wife kept the password in a book next to the computer.
“I definitely felt it was OK to confirm [the affair] by reading her e-mail in our home,” said Walker.
While Walker believed it was OK, Oakland County prosecutors did not and have charged Walker with felony misuse of a computer. If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison.
The case eventually fell apart due to Walker’s wife apparently doing the same thing and everyone in the case proving to be unreliable.
But this type of case is not a joke. The authorities just chose to treat it as one because they agreed with his motives and intentions.
Leave a Reply