Navy reservist sentenced for visa fraud

U.S. Navy Reserve Commander Jeromy Pittmann on Monday received a sentence of two and a half years behind bars for falsifying visa documents for Afghan nationals. A jury convicted him earlier this year on charges of conspiracy to commit bribery and false writing, bribery, false writing, and conspiracy to commit concealment of money laundering.

What happened? Since 2009, Congress has allotted the U.S. State Department a limited number of special visas per year that it can grant to Afghan nationals. To be eligible for those special visas, Afghan nationals must prove they worked as translators for U.S. forces deployed to Afghanistan.

Pittmann testified in more than 20 letters to U.S. government officials over several years that he knew Afghan nationals who were applying for the visas. He testified that he had supervised them while they served as translators for U.S. and NATO forces.

Pittmann also testified in those letters that the applicants’ lives were threatened because of the Taliban and insisted they would not pose a threat to America’s national security if allowed to enter the United States.

But prosecutors showed at trial that Pittmann did not know any of those applicants and had no basis to believe they should be eligible for the special visas. Prosecutors demonstrated as well that Pittman accepted thousands of dollars in bribes—carefully laundered through intermediaries—to write the letters.

Dig deeper: Read Leo Briceno’s report in The Sift about a House report on the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.