A U.S. foreign policy adviser who is accused of keeping more than 1,000 pages of classified records in his basement has been cooperating with investigators since his arrest and was released from jail to home confinement Tuesday, October 21, 2025.
Ashley J. Tellis, an expert on Indian and South Asian affairs who has worked in Washington think-tank and diplomatic circles for more than 20 years, was arrested this month after the FBI searched his Vienna, Virginia, residence and found a trove of classified records in a basement home office area. Federal prosecutors charged Tellis, 64, with one count of retaining national defense information.
A former staffer on the National Security Council during President George W. Bush’s administration and senior adviser to the U.S. ambassador to India, Tellis maintained a top-secret security clearance through his roles as an adviser to the Defense and State departments. His attorneys pushed back on a Justice Department legal filing in the case that suggested Tellis may have been leaking classified defense records to China.
Prosecutors have not charged Tellis with transmitting classified records.
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“Any insinuation that Dr. Tellis has disclosed classified information – let alone to a foreign government – lacks any evidentiary basis,” defense attorneys John Nassikas and Deborah Curtis said in a court filing. “Regrettably, investigators appeared to interpret his routine professional duties, such as liaison work and international travel, as clandestine activity, reading something sinister into what were standard think-tank and scholarly foreign policy engagements.”
In an affidavit, an FBI agent described how Tellis had dined with Chinese officials in Northern Virginia at least four times from 2022 to last month. At the first of those meetings, according to the FBI affidavit, Tellis arrived with a manila envelope that he did not appear to have as he departed. At the most recent dinner last month, Chinese officials gave Tellis a “red gift bag,” the FBI agent said.
Tellis’s attorneys said the mention of the gift bag implied “that something nefarious occurred.”
“But the red gift bag contained tea – a common gift in Asian cultures,” the attorneys said. Tellis’s wife showed the bag to the FBI during their search, and although it was initially marked as potential evidence, the agents later removed the marking and left it at the residence, Nassikas and Curtis said. Inside the manila envelope, they added, was probably a printout of an article Tellis had written, as he was known to hand those out at meetings.
“There’s nothing wrong to be meeting with military attaches from China, from Pakistan, from whatever country,” Nassikas said at a hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, federal court Tuesday. In foreign policy circles, it’s considered “routine” to exchange modest gifts, he said.
“The sole charge against him involves the unlawful retention of national defense information – not its dissemination,” the attorneys wrote. “There is no allegation, let alone evidence, that Dr. Tellis ever shared, attempted to share, or intended to share national defense information with unauthorized individuals.”
A federal magistrate judge granted a joint request from prosecutors and Tellis’s attorneys for home confinement pending trial. Tellis had been in jail since his arrest Oct. 11.
“For those entrusted with our country’s most sensitive information, protecting it is a privilege and solemn responsibility,” Sue J. Bai, a top prosecutor in the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in a statement Tuesday. “With the hard work and dedication of our prosecutors and agents, we will hold this defendant accountable for breaching that trust and exploiting his security clearance to unlawfully retain classified information detailing our military capabilities.”
Tellis will be meeting for the first time with prosecutors and FBI officials on Nov. 4 to discuss “possible resolutions of the case, including any potential resolution prior to indictment,” according to court records. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema agreed to extend to two months the usual one-month deadline to obtain an indictment after an arrest as negotiations continue, according to a court order.