Federal prosecutors accidentally returned an external hard drive to former DOJ lawyer Jeffrey Wertkin that contained the 40 whistleblower cases he pleaded guilty to stealing and trying to sell, according to a letter Wertkin sent to the judge overseeing his case.

In a letter dated March 16 and posted to the docket Wednesday afternoon, Wertkin informed U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney that after his sentencing hearing, prosecutors returned the hard drive which had been seized from him when he was arrested wearing a wig in a Cupertino hotel lobby last year. Wertkin, who was a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld at the time, said he didn't realize what the hard drive contained until he opened it to find the 40 sealed complaints.

“In other words, the Government handed me copies of the 40 sealed qui tam complaints they had just prosecuted me for stealing,” Wertkin wrote.

He indicated that federal prosecutors told him to destroy any documents that he “should not have.” But out of concern about how the government might react to finding any trace of the stolen complaints on his computer, he contacted his attorney Cris Arguedas of Arguedas, Cassman & Headley to tell her he wanted to return the hard drive as soon as possible. According to the letter, an FBI agent was sent to Wertkin's parents' house in New York to retrieve the hard drive on March 9.

“I believe that returning the 40 sealed qui tam complaints to me after sentencing, whether done so intentionally or the result of carelessness, reveal that the guideline range based on theft of property of over $250,000 overstated the severity of my offense,” Wertkin continued.

Chesney sentenced Wertkin to 2.5 years in prison earlier this month after he pleaded guilty to charges of obstruction of justice and interstate transport of stolen property. Wertkin's letter indicates he contemplated filing a motion for a shorter sentence based on the government's flippant treatment of the documents. But in a passage that seems to indicate Wertkin intend for the judge to publicly file his letter on the docket, he wrote that he “worried that making a public filing about this would cause DOJ further embarrassment.”

Federal prosecutors filed a response to Wertkin's letter with the court Wednesday afternoon claiming his letter is really a response to the judge's decision not to refer him to a prison drug treatment program which could have greatly decreased his sentence.

“Accordingly, it is clear that Wertkin is seeking admission to the [drug treatment] program to try to game the system and have his sentenced reduced a full year by participating in a program that has limited resources and which should be reserved for the many inmates who are truly addicts and who desperately need the intensive … program,” prosecutors wrote. “The defendant is not such a person as the Court has correctly concluded.”

Arguedas, who according the government's filing no longer represents Wertkin, declined to comment.

Read Wertkin's letter and the government's response below: