Eight current or former Navy officials, including five admirals, could be compelled to testify in a bribery case against the Navy’s former second-highest-ranking official that includes allegations of a spurned lover and an illicit deal sketched on a napkin, according to new court documents.
Burke, 62, of Coconut Creek, Fla., is accused of awarding a sole source contract to the executives, Charlie Kim, 50, and Meghan Messenger, 47, in exchange for a $500,000-a-year post-retirement job and stock options at their technology services firm, Next Jump. All have pleaded not guilty, questioning the logic of offering a $500,000-a-year job for what was ultimately a $355,000 sole-source award.
The recent filings — from Burke, Kim and Messenger — take aim at a key witness in the case, identified only as “Person 3,” a career Pentagon official alleged to have been in a romantic relationship with the married Burke. According to a filing from Burke’s lawyer, the investigation stemmed from a complaint Person 3 made to the Pentagon’s inspector general.
Person 3, prosecutors allege, attended a key lunch meeting in July 2021 where Burke, Kim and Messenger agreed on the plan to award a contract for leadership training services to their firm, then have Burke join it with salary and stock options. In Person 3’s telling to investigators, Kim sketched the illicit proposal on a napkin.
But attorneys for Burke and the executives allege that Person 3 had mischaracterized the interaction between Burke and the executives because she was upset that Burke had ended their romantic relationship and reconciled with his wife. Prosecutors, they say, also intentionally omitted from law enforcement probable cause affidavits — typically used to obtain search and arrest warrants — that a Virginia appeals court confirmed in 2013 that Person 3 committed perjury in her recently finalized divorce and child custody case.
“The only evidence of this alleged agreement is the deeply flawed eyewitness testimony” of Person 3, Burke attorney Tim Parlatore wrote. “By embellishing certain elements of the conversation, Person 3 was able to recast an entirely legal conversation into a criminal transaction. With her prior perjury finding undisclosed to investigators Person 3 misled the IG and the FBI as to her credibility in all matters, instead reinforcing her senior position within the DOD as a false mantle of credibility.”
In a written statement on behalf of the woman, her former divorce attorney said: “It is a brazen misrepresentation of the record to claim that a court found Person 3 to have committed perjury. Perjury is a criminal offense with certain elements and no such finding was ever made in the context of this civil case. The Court made credibility determinations on certain aspects of Person 3’s testimony, which is much different than perjury. A court of another jurisdiction subsequently found Person 3 credible upon transfer of jurisdiction on future issues following the divorce.”
The attorney also said Person 3 was not a senior official, and if the case went to trial, the evidence would show she terminated the relationship with Burke.
Prosecutors did not respond to claims about the woman’s credibility, but they said in court filings that Kim repeated the plan to investors in a July 2021 email. After Burke was hired, Messenger confided to Kim in a text that she had erupted at the ex-admiral in a bout of frustration when the company didn’t immediately get the contract, saying “no contract no job,” prosecutors alleged.
“Kim put the pieces of scheme in writing, but it was Messenger who said the quiet part out loud,” prosecutors Joshua S. Rothstein and Trevor Wilmot wrote.
The executives said the statements were taken out of context, and that the contract award was also supported by Burke’s predecessor as vice chief of naval operations, Adm. William Moran. Moran unexpectedly retired instead of taking over as chief of naval operations in August 2019 because of his ongoing work with a former top Navy spokesman accused of sexual misconduct.
The executives recently won a federal judge’s permission to issue trial subpoenas to five former or current Navy admirals and three other current or former Navy officials, including Person 3. Kim and Messenger’s public court filings did not identify the subpoena targets by name but said the requests were calibrated to uncover facts that “will undercut the government’s version of events and show that there was no bribery scheme.”
“Defendants intend to show, through subpoena-derived evidence, that Next Jump had a bona fide, $100 million engagement with the United States Navy that predated any alleged bribery scheme,” lead Kim attorney William A. Burck wrote in a joint filing with Messenger’s defense.
A Navy spokesperson declined to comment, referring questions to the Justice Department.
All three of those charged face counts of conspiracy to commit bribery and bribery, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Burke faces additional counts of performing acts affecting a personal financial interest and concealing material facts, punishable by up to 30 years. While all the defendants jointly attacked the credibility of Person 3 in their filings, the executives also sought to be tried separately from Burke’s, asserting that they relied on his advice to make sure what they were doing was legal.
Lawyers for the executives wrote in a court filing Monday that they expect the government to rely on statements Burke made during a recorded “knock-and-talk” interview with Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents and Defense Criminal Investigate Service agents with the inspector general’s office on Oct. 3, 2023.
“Burke, in essence, confessed to the charged offenses in these statements he made to the agents,” the executives alleged, although further details about the interview were redacted. The executives asserted that they could not get a fair trial if tried alongside Burke because Burke would have a right not to testify or face cross-examination.
Burke’s attorney denied that the admiral confessed and also sought a separate trial from the executives. He has said that the executives appeared to be blaming the admiral for any wrongdoing when it was Burke who harbored concerns about his partners’ ethics. Burke’s defense called Kim “an entrepreneur who is prone to exaggeration and, in many cases, outright false statements,” and accused the Next Jump leader of “embellishing and even outright fabricating portions of the conversations [with Burke] to inflate their investor’s confidence.”
Burke was chief of naval personnel from 2016 to 2019, and vice chief of naval operations from 2019 to 2020, before retiring in summer 2022 as commander in Europe. He has said he turned to Next Jump for leadership training after reports of Navy command failures and corruption that included two deadly warship collisions weeks apart in 2017.
