Woman charged in submarine secrets case will stay in custody

WASHINGTON — A federal magistrate judge ordered the continued detention of the wife of a Navy nuclear engineer on charges she participated in a plot to sell American submarine secrets to a foreign country.

In an order confining Diana Toebbe to the custody of U.S. Marshals, Magistrate Judge Robert W. Trumble noted video evidence presented by prosecutors that she was a willing participant in dropping classified documents in a dead drop set up by undercover FBI agents and cited text messages between her and her husband in 2019 about leaving the country.

“The weight of the evidence against defendant Diana Toebbe is strong,” the judge wrote in his order, which he signed Thursday.

The magistrate judge also said the government had not found either the full trove of documents the Toebbes were accused of trying to sell to a foreign government or the money provided to them by undercover FBI agents.

The Toebbes pleaded not guilty this week to charges they conspired to sell secrets of the Navy’s nuclear-powered Virginia-class attack submarines to a foreign country. In a detention hearing that followed, Jonathan Toebbe did not contest the government’s efforts to confine him, but Diana Toebbe’s lawyers mounted vigorous effort to have her freed before her trial.

In the court proceedings, prosecutors argued the Toebbes had been considering fleeing the country for years. In the order, the judge highlighted encrypted text messages found on the couple’s phones after the FBI raid.

“We’ve got passports, and some savings. In a real pinch we can flee quickly,” Jonathan Toebbe wrote, on March 7, 2019.

In a hearing this week, Diana Toebbe’s lawyer, Edward B. MacMahon Jr., said the idea that Diana Toebbe was preparing to flee the country was rebutted by one clear fact: She and her husband had let their passports expire in February 2020.

MacMahon argued that with court monitoring, Diana Toebbe was little threat to flee. Continuing to detain Toebbe would threaten her health, he said, and her two children needed the care of a parent.

But prosecutors said they had not found the $100,000 in cryptocurrency that undercover FBI agents gave the Toebbes while they were gathering evidence against them. Until the money was found, they argued, Diana Toebbe would have the means to escape.