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Pentagon employee arrested on way to airport with documents marked “Top Secret,” feds say
A judge ruled Tuesday over prosecutors’ objections that a Defense Department civilian employee who is a U.S.-Turkish dual citizen can remain free on home detention while he awaits trial on accusations he mishandled classified documents.
Gokhan Gun, 50, of Falls Church, Virginia, was arrested Friday outside his home and charged with mishandling classified material, the Justice Department said Tuesday.
When he was arrested, Gun was on his way to the airport for a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, according to an FBI affidavit. He was carrying papers including a document that was marked “Top Secret.”
Gun told authorities he was going to Mexico on a fishing trip. Prosecutors say he agreed to a search of his home. Inside they found other classified documents.
“Among the items recovered from the searches were a Top Secret document and a printout listing Gun’s security clearances — both of which were recovered from Gun’s backpack,” prosecutors said. “Inside the residence, agents also observed stacks of papers among which were multiple documents with visible classification markings, including pages bearing Top Secret and SCI classification markings.”
At a detention hearing Tuesday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, prosecutors asked that Gun remain jailed while awaiting trial. They said they may bring additional charges, including possible charges under the Espionage Act, if the ongoing investigation can prove that he not only mishandled classified documents but sought to disseminate documents relevant to the national defense to a foreign power.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Anthony Rodregous said the fact that Gun was arrested carrying classified documents, as well as his intelligence-community credentials, on the way to the airport for a purported Mexican fishing trip was circumstantial evidence of his intent to distribute the documents.
“You don’t need your intelligence-community credentials to go fishing,” Rodregous said.
But U.S. Magistrate Judge Ivan Davis said it was “too far of a leap” to assume that his trip to Mexico was connected to his mishandling of documents. He said until the government provides stronger evidence, the case is no different than any other classified-documents case and the presumption is that Gun should be free while he awaits trial.
Despite Davis’ ruling, it appears unlikely Gun will go free anytime soon. Prosecutors indicated they will appeal Davis’ ruling to a district court judge, and as a result Davis delayed implementing his order.
Davis also required that Gun be subject to home detention and GPS monitoring if and when he is released pretrial.
Gun is an electrical engineer with the Joint Warfare Analysis Center and has worked there since September. He holds a Top Secret security clearance.
In court papers, prosecutors say he printed out classified documents at his office, often late in the day when co-workers had left, and took them home.
Prosecutors allege that between May 10 and Aug. 7, Gun printed over a dozen documents marked classified. In August, investigators allegedly saw Gun exiting his office “with a bag full of hard copy documents” before going home.
He was born in Turkey and became a U.S. citizen in 2021, according to court papers. In the past 20 years, he has taken 15 overseas trips, including seven trips to Turkey, where his parents live, according to the affidavit.
Gun’s attorney, Rammy Barbari, declined comment after Tuesday’s hearing.
The hearing unfolded on the same day that an Army soldier pleaded guilty to charges that accuse him of selling China sensitive information related to U.S. military capabilities.
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Trump announces Musk, Ramaswamy will lead newly-created Department of Government Efficiency
President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that billionaire Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy will head up a new agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump in a statement said the two “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies – Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement.”
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In his own statement, Musk said the new agency “will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!”
Musk was a major part of Trump’s reelection campaign effort, while Ramaswamy ran against Trump in the Republican primary before endorsing him.
The department’s acronym, DOGE, is also a dog meme that inspired Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that was created as a joke and is credited with being the first meme coin.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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After Hurricane Helene, a North Carolina woman uses the power of social media to reunite families with old photographs lost in the storm
We’ve seen the images of destruction, debris and flooding left behind from Hurricane Helene. But other images also came out of the storm: family photos – snapshots of happy memories and important milestones – left behind in the mess.
After the deadly hurricane in October, Taylor Schenker, who lives in Canton, North Carolina, nearby hard-hit Asheville, found herself with about 200 family photos that didn’t belong to her.
It started after the storm. Schenker’s house weathered Helene well, but she said her friend’s entire home was destroyed by flooding from the Swannanoa River. At least 220 people across six states died in the hurricane, including over 40 in Buncombe County, which includes Asheville.
Schenker and her friend went for a walk to check out the home, which was one of the many in Asheville that was destroyed.
“We spent about four hours digging through the mud, looking for any belongings of hers we could find, because her house literally just doesn’t exist anymore,” Schenker told CBS News last month. “And during that process, I found about four of five individual photographs and we laid out the photos – along with some clothes and we found an American flag – along the bank, hoping they would be reunited with people.”
Vanessa Graham via Photos from Helene
Schenker said thinking about the photos she left behind kept her up that night. “Just thinking, ‘Here are these little photographs that miraculously made it through all of this and now are sitting here and what if it rains or what if the wind blows and they aren’t able to be reunited with their family,'” she said. “That would be such a shame because they made it through all of this. And I know how special a memory like that can really be for somebody.”
So, Taylor went back the next day to get the photos and ended up finding more. She said it was obvious the photos belonged to multiple families.
“It was [a photo of] a middle school basketball team. It was a photo of a beloved dog. I found a wedding photo of a bride hugging somebody,” she said. “You take photos because you have a moment you want to remember and so, they did all seem just special.”
Realizing how many important family memories she now had in her possession, she started the Photos from Helene Instagram page — a virtual lost-and-found. She hoped people would recognize the photos on her page and word of mouth would help reunite them with their rightful owners.
The Instagram page is filled with school portraits, Christmas cards, images of childhood friends and families on vacation. She even found a photo of Michael Jordan dunking the ball that a local man says his dad snapped years ago.
Schenker took them home, dusted them off and categorized them in folders and bins for safekeeping until they could be returned to their owners.
Schenker said she found about 100 photos herself, but picked up about another 100 from other people who found them, including search and rescue teams. At the time of our interview in late October, she said she had returned about 15% of the photos she has collected. She still adds new photos to Instagram daily.
Each reunion is a heartwarming reminder that what she’s doing is important. “Being able to have that moment where you hand something so special to somebody and then also just give them a hug – because they’ve lost likely their entire home in this situation – it’s such a privilege to have an insight into this moment in their lives through these photographs and be able to give them back to them,” she said.
Schenker mails photos to people who are no longer in the area, but she also hand delivers the ones that belong to families who stayed close by. In one case, a college-aged son found his family’s photos on her Instagram, reached out to Schenker and connected her with his mom.
“We have now found five photos of this one family, of these two sons, and when I met with the mom to reunite the photos, she shared that one of her sons had actually passed,” Schenker said. “And so, when they lost their home, they lost all memory of this child. Which is absolutely devastating in addition to the devastation that has already happened.”
She said she recently went for another so-called photo walk – where she digs through debris to find images – and recognized the woman’s late son in yet another photo.
Becky and Nancy Tate, a mother-daughter duo, also found old family photos through the Instagram page. “It was an extremely strange feeling to just be scrolling on social media and randomly see a picture of me when I was 10 in front of a Christmas tree,” Nancy Tate told CBS News on Instagram. “That’s how I found out about Photos from Helene, a total fluke and scrolling and seeing a picture of me covered in dirt.”
Tate family via Photos from Helene
“A very surreal feeling to know all of your belongings and photos have been lost, and then to realize that some person you’ve never met is trying to help people locate these pictures, just out of the kindness of their heart,” Nancy said. “That truly sums up the Asheville community.”
Nancy tagged her mom in the Instagram comments, saying her mom cried when she saw it. Becky told CBS News she felt a combination of joy and shock – “a time of high adrenaline and disbelief.”
Schenker said that many families who lived in the same neighborhood before the hurricane have recognized other people’s photos on the Photos from Helene Instagram page and helped connect each other to Schenker.
“The process is definitely fulfilling,” she said. “It’s fun to see the moment that a photograph is reunited and to see the people in the comments tagging each other and saying, ‘Hey, is this you?’ or ‘Oh my gosh, you just reminded me of this moment in my life that I had totally forgotten about.'”
She said she chose her Instagram’s name because most of the photos we’ve seen come out of the hurricane show the devastation left behind – but her photos from Helene are happy memories of Asheville and the lives lived there.
“You still can’t go to the grocery store without seeing piles of debris,” she said. “And I think that has definitely made me and others celebrate these wins even bigger. Because you have to in order to get through the day to day now.”
