Garrison Courtney

Garrison Kenneth Courtney, 44, entered a plea in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia to a charge of wire fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia said. Mr. Courtney will face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison when he is sentenced on Oct. 23 2020. Mr. Courtney worked as a spokesman for the D.E.A. from about 2005 through 2009. He applied for a job with the C.I.A. around 2005, and a conditional offer was extended to him, but it lapsed in 2007 when he did not respond. He never had any affiliation or job with the C.I.A. and was not a government employee after 2009. Mr. Courtney fraudulently obtained a job as a private contractor for the National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center, or NITAAC, according to prosecutors. The position granted him access to sensitive, private information about federal agencies that were being supported by NITAAC. The authorities said that Mr. Courtney had used the information to direct money from contracts to companies he was being paid by. From about 2012 through 2016, Mr. Courtney involved about a dozen companies, based in New York, Illinois, Maryland and Virginia, in the scheme. Mr. Courtney went to “extraordinary lengths to perpetuate the illusion that he was a deep-cover operative,” prosecutors said. Several of the companies had eventually started to ask why they were not being paid for the contracts they had been promised and for other tasks. When he was questioned, Mr. Courtney would accuse them of being spies — in one case, an Iranian spy. Mr. Courtney supplied Capefirst Funding with forged documents as evidence of his government status. The company raised the money for Mr. Courtney under the premise that he would pay it $2.55 million in 30 days. Capefirst Funding has a fraud judgment for $2.55 million against Mr. Courtney.