A longtime defense contractor from South Dakota was sentenced to 10 years in prison for trying to share classified information about the United States Air Force with Russia, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday.

John Murray Rowe, Jr., 67, pleaded guilty last year to multiple espionage charges originally brought against him in December 2021, according to the Justice Department.

Among those charges were one count of attempting to deliver national defense information to a foreign government and three counts of willfully communicating national defense information. He was sentenced to 126 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release and fined $25,000.

Rowe was employed for almost four decades as a test engineer for several cleared defense contractors and hel

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