Pentagon contractor charged with unlawful retention of classified information
By Sean Lyngaas, CNN
(CNN) — A man who worked as a Pentagon contractor and State Department adviser has been charged with removing classified information from a government facility after investigators found over a thousand documents with classified markings at his house in Virginia.
Some of the documents that Ashley Tellis, an expert in South Asian affairs, allegedly accessed and removed refer to Air Force tactics and techniques, according to court records.
Tellis allegedly met numerous times with Chinese government officials over the last several years, says an FBI affidavit made public on Tuesday. In April 2023, Tellis had dinner with Chinese government officials in a Washington, DC, suburb and “could be occasionally overheard talking about Iranian-Chinese relations and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence,” an FBI agent wrote in the affidavit.
Tellis is an unpaid adviser at the State Department and a contractor at the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), according to the affidavit. ONA is the Pentagon’s in-house think tank for anticipating security threats that the Defense Department said in March would be dismantled and “restructured.”
It was not immediately clear from the affidavit what information, if any, Tellis allegedly passed to the Chinese government officials. CNN has requested comment from the Eastern District of Virginia, where Tellis was charged.
Tellis made his initial court appearance on Tuesday. A detention hearing is scheduled for October 21. An attorney for Tellis declined to comment. Tellis did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Born in India, Tellis is a naturalized US citizen, according to the court documents, and is listed as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a prominent US think tank, for which he published analysis as recently as last week.
Lindsey Halligan, the Trump-appointed US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, authorized the search and the charges against Tellis, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. “The charges as alleged in this case represent a grave risk to the safety and security of our citizens,” Halligan said in a statement.
A State Department official confirmed that Tellis is a State Department consultant and was arrested on Saturday. The Pentagon declined to comment.
CNN has requested comment from the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, on the suggestion he met with Chinese officials.
China is one of the top counterintelligence threats to US national security secrets, according to American officials and private experts. A US Navy sailor, Jinchao Wei, was convicted of espionage in August after agreeing to sell Navy secrets to a Chinese intelligence officer for $12,000, the Justice Department said then.
CNN’s Kristen Holmes and Jennifer Hansler contributed reporting.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
