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A Sparta woman sentenced five and half years for concealing resources intended to be provided to a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
37-year-old Georgianna Giampietro was indicted in 2019 on the charges. She pled guilty to the charges in January.
According to court documents, an undercover agent approached Giampietro seeking information on joining a foreign. terrorist group. She provided the agent instructions on how to safely travel to Syria and regularly communicated with a contact to assist the agent.
That instruction and advice included actions that the undercover agent and her husband should undertake before making the trip, like severing ties with other persons 6-8 months in advance; acquiring new phones before they traveled; and considering traveling through Turkey prior to entering Syria, according to the US Department of Justice.
Giampietro utilized an end-to-end encrypted social media platform to communicate with the undercover and with her contact, and in some instances utilized self-destruct timers within her communications so that those communications would automatically delete, without the possibility of recovery, after a specified time.
