An 11 year-long employee of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Joseph Asarisi, age 49, was arrested by Sheriff’s detectives for misrepresenting himself as a law enforcement officer for purposes of receiving and disseminating sensitive information deemed for law enforcement personnel only.
According to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Asarisi received hundreds of law enforcement sensitive documents from various official law enforcement sites including Homeland Security and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office. He then forwarded this information to non-law enforcement persons, including a renowned anti-government author based in New York City.
Sheriff’s detectives travelled to Los Angeles to interview the deputy there who provided many of the intelligence reports to Asraisi. They also travelled to New York City to interview the author who received many of the reports. That author, when questioned by Maricopa County Sheriff’s detectives, initially said he knew nothing of Asarisi or his emails but when pressed, quickly refused to cooperate and referred detectives to his attorney.
Asarisi, a naturalized citizen from Ukraine, was a civilian employee working in the Sheriff’s inmate laundry division since 2003. The investigation against him began soon after employees in the Sheriff’s technology bureau noticed a large amount of terrorism related documents on Asarisi’s profile and reported it the Sheriff’s Criminal Intelligence Division for review.
After a month long investigation by the Sheriff’s computer forensics technicians and other detectives, a search warrant was executed in June 2014 on both Asarisi’s work and home computers. Analyses were conducted on his email accounts which ultimately showed Asarisi used his Sheriff’s office email address as ‘proof’ that he worked for law enforcement, thereby gaining access to law enforcement only documents pertaining to terrorism, human trafficking, Jihadist reports, as well as national and international intelligence hot sheets.
“A number of law enforcement agencies assisted us in this investigation in the beginning, each understanding how dangerous a leak of this kind of information could potentially be, particularly if he was sharing this information to those with anti-American interests,” Sheriff Joe Arpaio said. “At this point we believe we stopped it in time before this confidential information got into the wrong hands.”
Asarisi was interviewed by detectives and admitted to his crimes. He was arrested and booked and subsequently indicted on felony charges of impersonating a police officer, forgery and computer tampering.