In the waning days of the Biden administration, the Justice Department undertook a rare prosecution of a recently retired four-star Navy admiral, alleging he was bribed with a job in exchange for steering lucrative contracts to a company charged with training top leaders.
The case conjures comparisons to the Fat Leonard scandal — the sprawling investigations and prosecutions that snared U.S. naval officers as part of a civilian defense contractor’s decade-long bribery scheme. Now, the new ongoing corruption prosecution, which is much more limited in scale and largely rests on a single, problematic witness, may be faltering.
Two corporate executives who are on trial and are alleged to have bribed retired Adm. Robert Burke recently spoke exclusively with Military.com. As they look back on Burke, their relationship with the Navy and the trial, they say the case reminds them of Fat Leonard but also of a deadly tragedy — the collisions of two destroyers in the Pacific nearly a decade ago — and how little the Navy seems to have learned from either.
Read Next: New Army Fitness Test: No More Ball Yeet, Higher Standards for Combat Arms
Charlie Kim and Meghan Messenger run a company called Next Jump that offers training and coaching programs to leaders and executives at major companies and some government agencies.
According to Kim and Messenger — and even Burke himself — the relationship between them began in the shadow of the collisions involving the USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain in the Pacific in the summer of 2017.
“We met Admiral Burke after the first ship crashed … and then, literally, weeks later, the second ship crashed,” Kim said, adding that Burke “came in kind of really interested in the work.”
The investigations into the two collisions revealed problems with training and undermanning that led to sailors being overworked and sleep deprived. But one of the deepest issues was that commanders were unwilling or unable to speak up to Navy brass and sound the alarm about problems they were seeing on their own deckplates.
In a Next Jump video made years later, in 2022, Burke himself said that members of the crew on the destroyers didn’t “speak up because they weren’t confident” that they were seeing the distraction before them “correctly.”
In the years that followed, that last lesson seemed to be failing to take hold in the Navy.
In 2019, nearly two years after the collisions, ProPublica reported that Adm. Philip Davidson, then the Navy’s top officer in charge of readiness, moved to show the fleet that he was committed to genuine reform. However, when asked whether commanders were empowered to push back on deployment orders if they felt their ships weren’t ready, Davidson snapped.
“If you can’t take your ships to sea and accomplish the mission with the resources you have,” he said, “then we’ll find someone who will.”
The idea was that Next Jump would offer a fresh perspective and new insights into how the Navy trains its middle and upper levels of leadership to deal with the cultural rot uncovered within the ranks.
According to records from the criminal case, Next Jump was awarded its first Navy contract in early 2018 for around $2 million. A second contract followed later that year for $10 million “to train part of the Navy workforce,” according to those documents.
Since that time, Messenger and Kim say they’ve visited more than 100 Navy commands; spoken at the Naval War College; personally mentored more than two dozen admirals; and had a chance to observe events like Navy SEAL training in Coronado, California, and basic training of Marines at Parris Island, South Carolina.
The pair say that they’ve also interacted and trained more than 1,000 sailors through their leadership courses in New York, Boston and London.
But in their conversation with Military.com, the two executives say that the Navy’s cultural problems are still present among its top leaders and those issues are having knock-on effects that can be seen in other scandals beyond the collisions.
“They have a culture of more autonomy and agency than any other service … however, untrained, it can lead to bad judgment calls by individuals but even more dangerous when infecting teams,” Kim said.
That Navy culture of more freedom and discretion “cuts both ways,” Kim said.
“They have more autonomy to actually just do what they believe is the right thing … but that same freedom to apply your own judgment, if not trained right, can have the opposite effect,” he said, adding that “bad cabals can also do bad things.”
The pair of executives pointed to Fat Leonard as one example. They believe the Navy dynamic is responsible for it “having more issues than any other service,” also citing the destroyer collisions in the Pacific and the trial of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher for war crimes.
The far-reaching Fat Leonard scandal goes back more than a decade and was masterminded by Leonard Glenn “Fat Leonard” Francis, owner of the defense contracting business Glenn Defense Marine Asia.
Francis was accused of amassing a network of at least 200 Navy personnel that ranged from admirals to Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents who helped him bilk the service out of at least $35 million from inflated and fraudulent contracts for port services in exchange for lavish dinners, prostitutes and cash.
While nearly three dozen people were charged in connection to that case and 22 pleaded guilty, many of the convictions later fell apart on appeal and Leonard himself briefly escaped custody to flee to Venezuela.
More recently, in 2021, other Navy officials were again hauled into court after federal investigators alleged they conspired with another contractor — this time in the Middle East — to defraud the service out of at least $50 million.
While the pair said nothing of the most recent Navy bribery allegation — their own case — legal filings from the ongoing trial show that their lawyers have asked the court to compel testimony from five of Burke’s contemporaries, 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.
Meanwhile, the issues that were raised by the collisions of the Fitzgerald and McCain — part of a culture in which small failures and mistakes are not tolerated — still persist.
Messenger said that the No. 1 complaint she heard was “there’s no place to fail,” which she said “means there’s no place to learn.”
In her conversations with sailors, Messenger was also told that commanders and senior leaders often convince junior officers that many of the jobs and initiatives are “below the water line” efforts — meaning that failure results in sinking the ship.
In that pressurized environment, she said “there’s no space to be messy” and perfection becomes the baseline expectation.
“Leaders will give lip service to making mistakes, but they don’t really mean it, not in practice,” Messenger said.
Meanwhile, Kim says that, even among the admirals, efforts to empower top leaders to speak up have not yielded results.
Kim said that, in some of the trainings they observed, as soon as the four-star admiral walks out of the room, the more junior two-star officers say: “Please help us … we all nod that these ideas are so great, and as soon as they walk out, we’re like, ‘Oh my God, that’s such a dumb idea. … Someone needs to say something.'”
That issue, according to Kim, was the reason the Navy hired them — “to help the leadership in the Navy — the admirals — to literally find, two by two, the courage to actually have even closed-door discussions on what is the right thing.”
“The courage of just two people can stop bad accidents like Fat Leonard from happening,” he said.
In the meantime, it’s not clear how the government’s bribery case will unfold. The prosecution has argued that Burke and Next Jump worked together to get a lucrative contract and, in exchange, they hired the admiral upon retirement. Lawyers for Kim and Messenger argued 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.
While the Trump administration has shown a desire to try and hold more military leaders accountable, the Pentagon and Justice Department have offered nothing to suggest that it goes beyond high-profile and politically charged topics like the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“If you have a private that loses a sensitive item, that loses night vision goggles, that loses a weapon, you can bet that that private is going to be held accountable,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters in his only press briefing to date. “The same and equal standards must apply to senior military leaders.”
However, arguments are now being made to the Justice Department to have the Next Jump case dropped.
Burke’s attorney, Tim Parlatore, sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi in February in which he made the argument for a deferred prosecution and to instead let the Navy conduct an ethics investigation into the admirals’s dealings with Next Jump.
In his letter, which was reviewed by Military.com, Parlatore argued that a military investigation would achieve accountability “through appropriate military channels.”
In addition to being Burke’s attorney, Parlatore has become a key figure in the second Trump administration, having not only helped defend Donald Trump before he was elected but also acting as the personal attorney for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Meanwhile, legal experts have previously told Military.com that holding top military officers to account for bribery is extremely challenging.
Todd Huntley, the director of the National Security Law Program at the Georgetown University Law Center and a retired Navy captain and judge advocate, told Military.com in January that there are plenty of cases of top leaders overseeing contracts and then going to work for those companies after retirement.
Legally, bribery has to involve an “official act” and not setting up meetings, providing connections, or dropping hints of preference.
The law, as it stands now, doesn’t take into account a world that speaks in code. It demands an official act and, as Huntley said, something “substantial in return — directly in return — and not just: ‘Oh, you know, you retire, let’s talk.'”