U.S. naval historian's grandson pleads guilty to stealing records

Samuel Eliot Morison

Former Navy intelligence analyst Samuel L. Morison, who received a presidential pardon in 2001 after being convicted of passing secret ship photos to a British publication, pleaded guilty on Thursday to stealing records related to his naval historian grandfather.

Samuel L. Morison, 70, of Crofton, Maryland, entered the guilty plea in Baltimore's U.S. District Court to theft of government property and was sentenced to two years of probation, the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a statement.

Morison was accused in June 2014 of offering to sell to a bookstore owner U.S. records relating to the work of his late grandfather, Pulitzer Prize-winning naval historian Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, during World War Two. President Franklin Roosevelt had assigned the elder Morison to write a history of U.S. wartime naval operations. ...