A Bribery Scheme Abusing a Program for Afghan Allies Ends with a Conviction for a Navy Commander

A Navy reserve officer has been convicted by a federal court for his role in a scheme to falsify documents to get Afghans visas to live in the United States as part of the State Department's Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) program between 2018 and 2020.

Cmdr. Jeromy Pittmann was convicted by a jury on Friday in New Hampshire on four charges that included bribery and concealing a money laundering operation, court records show. His release paperwork lists Pittmann as living in Germany.

Federal prosecutors alleged that Pittmann signed more than 20 false letters of recommendation for visa applications in which he claimed to have supervised the applicants while they worked as translators in support of the U.S. Army and NATO, that their lives were in jeopardy and that he did not think they posed a threat to the national security of the United States. In exchange, Pittmann received $500 per person.

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He now faces decades in prison and his sentencing is set for Oct. 21, according to court records. He was initially arrested in March 2022.

Pittmann is a Navy Reserve officer with the Navy's combat construction community commonly known as "Seabees," according to Navy records provided to Military.com by the service.

Those records show that he deployed four times to Afghanistan and once to Iraq since he joined the Navy in 2003.

According to the indictment in his case, an unidentified co-conspirator reached out to Pittmann in February 2018 and asked for letters of recommendation for SIV applications.

"It's for my cousins I have 5 of them to go if you can do it will be good and they will pay for it," the person is quoted as saying before sending an email with "a recommendation letter format for your review."

Two weeks later, Pittmann and his co-conspirator negotiated a price and settled on $500 per person and the unnamed partner told him he had three applications ready for a total of $1,500 and "I will have another 5 next week so will be 2500."

By July of that year, Pittmann drafted up a dummy invoice for $2,000 and was asking his partner "which one of your companies do you want me to put on the invoice so it looks official?"

That fraudulent invoice, which prosecutors said was "to conceal and disguise the nature of the proceeds" resulted in a money laundering charge.

Once he was paid for the first batch of letters, Pittmann expressed a desire to expand the operation.

"I just wish the money would keep coming. Ha. Maybe one day we will get a business started. It would be nice to pay off my debts," Pittmann wrote in an email to his unnamed partner, according to court documents.

The co-conspirator replied that he had "more employees asking for recommendation letter I will let you know."

A year later, in 2019, Pittmann's co-conspirator said he would send along a ring for his wife as part of the payment for three more letters.

"I will send you their sweets as well that will make a good joy for a month or two. Haha," the man wrote, according to court documents.

The visa program that Pittmann and his co-conspirator were sending fake letters to was originally created in 2009 to give Afghans who served alongside U.S. troops as interpreters a way to escape the Taliban, who saw them as traitors and would often look to kill them. The tenuous security situation in the country even before U.S. troops departed in 2021 meant many felt that their lives were in peril.

As part of the scheme, Pitttmann falsely claimed that he was recommending people who worked at places such as North Kabul International Airport, Bagram Air Base and Camp Marmal Mazar, the indictment said.

The visas themselves were limited, and Congress had to authorize more of them over the years, leading to partisan gridlock and debate. Eventually the wait list for the SIVs grew to the tens of thousands as the program also became mired by slow processing times driven by low staffing and shoddy record-keeping by the military and contractors.

The lack of records made it challenging for some Afghans to prove their work with U.S. troops, and all of these issues came to a head during the messy U.S. withdrawal from the country in 2021. As the country's democratic government collapsed, veterans and volunteers scrambled to get former Afghan allies -- many of whom were still waiting on their SIVs -- out of the country and out of the path of the Taliban.

The result was tens of thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. got left behind.

A report by the nonprofit Association of Wartime Allies estimated that around 78,000 SIV applicants remained in Afghanistan after U.S. forces left in August 2021.

Court documents show that Pittmann is currently free ahead of his sentencing, though he has to check in with federal officials regularly and let the Department of Justice know if he plans to travel.

Military.com asked the Navy about his current status, but a spokesman for the branch wasn't able to immediately offer an answer.

Records provided to Military.com suggest that he is still in the reserves and, as of February 2022, assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 22 in Port Hueneme, Calif.

Those records also show that, in addition to his campaign medals, Pittmann was awarded the Joint Service Commendation Medal, the Joint Service Achievement Medal, and three Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals.

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