NORTH CAROLINA
An Army Captain, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, admitted to accepting $50,000n in gratuities from a contractor doing business with the U.S. military, officials said Thursday.
In connection with his plea, officials said Capt. David Anthony Kline, 32, admitted that while serving as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army stationed at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, he sought and accepted $50,000 in gratuities from a contractor who was doing business with the U.S. military.
Specifically, from January 2008 to April 2009, then-1st Lt. Kline was deployed to Kandahar Air Field where he oversaw the handling of transportation movement requests directing the transport of supplies from one location to another across Afghanistan, officials allege.
Although contracting procedures technically did not permit the authorizing officer to specify the particular Afghan trucking company that would perform the transportation, in practice, Kline and others were able to designate the Afghan company of their choice, according to authorities.
Kline admitted that he accepted $50,000 from an Afghan national who owned a trucking company doing business on government contracts at Kandahar Air Field, in return for Kline’s facilitation of the award and payment of numerous transportation contracts, officials said.
The case was investigated by the Defense Criminal Investigation Service, Army Criminal Investigation Command, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and FBI.