Biography
Keith Preston Gartenlaub is a former Boeing engineer whom the FBI investigated after agents suspected that someone at Boeing had supplied military-aircraft information to China. A secret foreign-intelligence search of his home computers produced no espionage charge, but prosecutors brought child-pornography charges based on files found during the search. He was arrested on August 27, 2014 and held until bond was approved on August 29. He was briefly taken into custody again on December 18 and re-released on December 19. A jury convicted him of receipt and possession in December 2015; the court later vacated the receipt count and sentenced him to 41 months on the possession count. He surrendered to the Bureau of Prisons on February 14, 2017, later spent six months in a halfway house, and completed Bureau of Prisons custody on January 29, 2019. He has never been charged with espionage or theft of government information.
Missing sentencing date verified October 12, 2026: The original federal docket preserved by the University of Michigan Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse was downloaded and PDF page 29 rendered and visually inspected. Entry 215 records the completed sentencing hearing on August 29, 2016 and the 41-month possession sentence. September 6 is the judgment-entry date, and October 31 is a surrender deadline, not the sentencing hearing. The existing separately documented custody periods and release date were preserved.
