She was getting her freak on.
The email from a federal agent in Dubai about her jet-set affair with a suspected Middle Eastern terrorist could have been torn from a supermarket paperback.
“I can’t stop thinking about…you. I haven’t slept for days,” Leatrice Malika De Bruhl-Daniels wrote, according to federal court documents. “I’m deeply attracted to you and I can’t think about you like that. Don’t worry, I will still fight for your visa situation as much as I can.”
As U.S. officials continued to investigate the Syrian businessman who’d thrown the federal agent a lavish birthday bash and helped treat her to a Greek vacation, she reportedly texted him, “I don’t want to think u hv lied to me since I put my neck out there for u.”
De Bruhl-Daniels, 45, a career federal law enforcement officer from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., is now facing federal charges in Houston of hampering the FBI’s counterterrorism investigation of 46-year-old Nadal Diya, and Diya has been charged with using fake travel documents. Both face a mid-December trial date that is likely to be postponed.
It’s a rare case that falls into a unique category — criminal reckonings for federal law enforcement officials accused of abusing their access to top-secret information. Cases involving misconduct prompted by romantic attachments are even more unusual.
“I can probably count on the fingers of one hand how many times that’s happened,” said Mervyn M. Mosbacker, Jr., a former U.S. attorney who has defended several federal agents. “You don’t go into a job like that unless you are really committed to the goals of the agency.”
Agent denies guilt
De Bruhl-Daniels, who is free on bond and awaiting trial at her mother’s home in Charlottesville, Va., appeared briefly before a Houston magistrate in late October where she pleaded not guilty to attempting to obstruct, influence or impede justice. She and her federal public defender have declined to comment about the case.
Jeff Houston, a spokesman for the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, said De Bruhl-Daniels has been on indefinite suspension since May without access to secure material. He declined to comment further.
Prosecutors are seeking extradition of Diya, who is free on bond in Toronto, on charges that he used fraudulent Guatemalan and Argentinian passports in Texas and Louisiana. Three other co-defendants, in Houston and Montgomery County, also face prosecution for passport and tax fraud.
De Bruhl-Daniels met Nadal Diya while she was stationed in the United Arab Emirates as a special agent with the NCIS. During their affair, she provided him warnings that he was being investigated as a possible terrorist and could be arrested, according to court documents.