A Ph.D. physicist who was indicted in 2010 for passing sensitive nuclear data from Los Alamos National Laboratory to a person she believed to be a Venezuelan government official has been sentenced to just over a year in prison, the Justice Department said Wednesday.
Marjorie Roxby Mascheroni, 71, of Los Alamos, New Mexico, pleaded guilty to passing “classified nuclear weapons data” to an unauthorized individual and lying to the F.B.I. The former contractor’s husband, who was also an employee at the laboratory, also pleaded guilty but has not received his prison sentence, ABC News reported Wednesday.
In the statement released by the Justice Department, the Mascheroni family admitted to having conspired to sell “Restricted Data” to “another person with reason to believe that the information would be used to “secure an advantage to Venezuela,” between 2007 and 2009, the news outlet reported.
The indictment by the Justice Department did not allege that any member of the Venezuelan government actually “sought or was passed any classified information” from the laboratory.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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