Franklin pleaded guilty to several espionage-related charges and was sentenced in January 2006 to nearly 13 years of prison, which was later reduced to ten months' house arrest.
Ellis said Franklin's community service should consist of "speaking to young people about the importance of public officials obeying the law".
According to The New York Times, Lawrence Franklin was one of two U.S. officials who held meetings with Iranian dissidents, including Paris-based arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, a key figure in the Iran–Contra affair.
These Pentagon-approved meetings were brokered by neoconservative Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, who had also played a part in Iran-Contra, and is said to have taken place in Paris in June 2003.
The indictment also alleged that Kenneth Pollack, a National Security Council staffer during the Clinton administration (and director of research at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy) provided information to former AIPAC employees Steve J. Rosen and Keith Weissman.
The complaint alleges that, at a June 26, 2003 lunch, Franklin disclosed classified national defense information related to potential attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq to two unnamed individuals.
In July 2004, in the Patisserie of the Pentagon City mall's Nordstroms, Franklin repeated the fabricated information orally to Weissman.
[10] He did indeed plead guilty to the three conspiracy counts on October 5, explaining that he had shared his frustrations over U.S. Iran policy with the other two defendants regularly in 2002 and later passed oral information to them he knew was classified in the hope they could get them to employees of the National Security Council who might be able to help force a harder line.
[12] In August, he denied Weissman and Rosen's motion to dismiss their indictment on the grounds that the government could still prosecute and punish those who retransmitted classified information orally regardless of whether they had a security clearance or not,[13] an interpretation of the Espionage Act that could have wide-reaching implications if it were allowed to become legal precedent.
Ellis III ruled that line to mean that prosecutors had to show that U.S. interests were harmed, not just that Rosen and Weissman relayed secrets to a foreign power: Israel.
Ellis' legal rulings set a high bar for the prosecutors, including a requirement to prove that Rosen and Weissman knowingly meant to harm the United States or aid another country.
Ellis said Franklin's community service should consist of "speaking to young people about the importance of public officials obeying the law".
[2][dubious – discuss] In late 2009, Franklin wrote that his objective was "to halt the rush to war in Iraq—at least long enough to adopt a realistic policy toward an Iran bent on doing us ill", not "to leak secrets to a foreign government".
Jonathan Pollard, an Israeli spy who worked in the Naval Antiterrorist Alert Center, pleaded guilty to espionage and was sentenced to life in prison in 1987.
"[19][20][21] Journalist Jim Lobe suggests that the Franklin story is part of a larger investigation into transfer of sensitive military and dual-use technologies to Israel, including powerful case-management software.
The Times argued that prosecuting private civilians would set a precedent for prosecuting journalists and others who publish leaked information, which "sounds more like Britain's Official Secrets Act than an American law consonant with the 1st Amendment", pointing out that "when Congress passed the Espionage Act, it explicitly rejected a version that would have punished newspapers for printing information "useful to the enemy".
"Who did something wrong is the people who brought this case, not just that they were incorrect, but that the attitude they had about Jews, Israel, AIPAC, was completely false, and unfortunately, a lot of that nonsense is still out there.
In the interview at his home, Rosen charged that Lawrence Franklin was railroaded into pleading guilty, by threats to harm his family by cutting off his pension.