The executives who run a company accused of being part of a bribery scheme along with a retired four-star Navy admiral are interested in speaking to more admirals as they build their defense, court documents show.
In a request filed Tuesday, lawyers for Charlie Kim and Meghan Messenger, co-CEOs of Next Jump, said that they wanted to subpoena five former or current Navy admirals, as well as a senior Navy official.
The move, if signed off by the judge, would pull more Navy leaders into the legal case centered on the bribery allegations now swirling around Robert Burke, a retired four-star admiral who rose to the second-highest uniformed position in the Navy and then went on to serve as commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe and U.S. Naval Forces Africa from 2020 to 2022.
When news of the allegations was first made public in late May, federal prosecutors alleged that Burke directed lucrative Navy contracts to Next Jump in 2021 while serving as a four-star admiral, and the company later hired him in 2022 for a starting salary of $500,000 per year.
"Defendants intend to show, through subpoena-derived evidence, that Next Jump had a bona fide, $100 million engagement with the United States Navy that pre-dated any alleged bribery scheme," the motion for the subpoenas argued.
"These facts and others derived from defendants' subpoenas will undercut the government's version of events and show that there was no bribery scheme," the court document added.
The court filing does not reveal the names of the admirals the defense wants to subpoena.
Previous court filings by the executives in their defense featured emails with Burke, as well as correspondence with Vice Adm. John Nowell, then chief of naval personnel; Rear Adm. Kyle Cozad, then the commander of Naval Education Training Command; and Rear Adm. Brett Mietus, then a captain and Burke's aide.
Nowell and Cozad have since retired from the Navy.
The court filings to date do not allege that any of those admirals have engaged in wrongdoing.
Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney overseeing prosecution of the case, argued that Burke "used his public office and his four-star status for his private gain" and suggested that he believed the admiral and Next Jump executives acted together, in a statement released at the time of Burke's arrest.
"The law does not make exceptions for admirals or CEOs. Those who pay and receive bribes must be held accountable," Graves said.
However, since then, the lawyers for Kim and Messenger have fired back, arguing in court filings that not only were they not complicit in any sort of bribery scheme but that they were pursuing in good faith a lucrative $100 million contract offered by Burke that later turned out to be a lie.
The two executives asked the court to separate their case from Burke's in mid-July, with lawyers telling the court that they "intend to offer evidence at trial that, in an effort to influence contracts between [Next Jump] and the Navy, Burke may have deliberately and repeatedly misled [Kim and Messenger] to believe that he could lawfully engage in employment discussions."
Next Jump is a company that largely specializes in training executives on leadership, and its relationship with the Navy goes back to 2018 when it was awarded its first service contract for around $2 million.
A second contract followed later that year for $10 million "to train part of the Navy workforce," according to court documents.
Those contracts came right as the Navy was reeling from two deadly at-sea collisions in the Pacific Ocean that killed nearly 20 sailors and revealed a toxic culture among commanders that ignored years of warnings about exhausted sailors, poor training and ships run ragged.
According to emails cited in Next Jump's filing, by the fall of 2019, a large $100 million proposal was put forward that would allow the company to "'develop people faster than anyone,' which would provide the Navy with a 'new competitive advantage' and effectively 'upgrade' the Navy."
That November, Burke told the pair that the newly confirmed chief of naval operations, Adm. Michael Gilday, had signed off on the plan, according to an email cited in the motion.
The Next Jump executives say that, in the process of pursuing that large contract, they met with Burke and a woman he identified as a senior official in the Office of the Under Secretary of the Navy and started discussing a job for him at their company after he retired.
The woman was, in fact, Burke's girlfriend.
Tim Parlatore, the lawyer representing Burke, confirmed to Military.com last month that the admiral was in an "intimate relationship" with the woman while he was in the beginning stages of divorce but that, since then, he and his wife reconciled.
In their motion, lawyers for Kim and Messenger argued that the presence of Burke's romantic partner undercuts the allegation that they were conspiring to bribe the admiral.
In responding to the request to separate the cases, Parlatore argued that "Kim is an entrepreneur who is prone to exaggeration and, in many cases, outright false statements" and that the two executives are "attempting to falsely blame Adm. Burke for telling them that everything was permissible."
According to court records, the last arguments on the subpoena requests are due to the judge overseeing the case by next Friday.
According to the Justice Department, if convicted, Burke faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison, while Kim and Messenger each face a maximum penalty of 20 years.
