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…
