Key word in the press release is “retired.” As with most of the individuals implicated in this scandal, they were allowed to leave active duty and begin receiving their pensions before facing justice. Retirement pay for a Navy CAPT (O-6) with 30 years of service is $8400 a month; a Master Chief who served the same number of years gets a retirement check of just over $5000 a month. And a CPO who spends 26 years on active duty still gets $2600 a month.
The “excuse” normally given for not taking a retiree’s pension is that the crimes were not related to their honorable military service. But in the Fat Leonard scandal, most of those accepting gifts, bribes and other gratuities were still in uniform, so revoking their pensions would seem to be in order.
However, the chances of that happening are virtually nil. Convicted Congressional crook Randy “Duke” Cunningham collected both a Navy and a Congressional pension while serving a long sentence for corruption, and those payments continue to this day. Heck, the family of FBI traitor Robert Hanssen still gets his monthly pension check; continuation of those payments was one of the stipulations in his plea deal.
Allowing criminals to establish their pensions before going to jail is also an established practice in the civil service ranks. If Congress fails to act, both Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok will collect their civil service pensions.
And remember that infamous cheat from the EPA—the guy who didn’t work on Friday for years, claiming he was part of a secret CIA task force that met every Friday at Langley? The same guy who spent six months at his beach house on Cape Cod after telling his EPA superiors he would be “deployed” to Afghanistan during that time? In the finest Washington tradition, he was allowed to retire before going to federal prison for three years, so the pension checks kept rolling in while he was behind bars.
Hanssen himself gets free room and board for the rest of his worthless life, in very secure government housing ...