Cross pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and aggravated identity theft. Earlier, co-defendant Marlon McKnight pleaded guilty to the same charged; four other people were indicted for their alleged participation in the scheme.

In 2015, OPM acknowledged that a network hack had exposed the personal information of about 22 million current and former federal employees. Chinese hackers apparently had managed to get into the OPM files in 2012 but were not detected until 2014.

In a June 21 letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and OMP Director Jeff T.H. Pon, Warner said he had not received any information he requested about how the fraud was connected to the OPM data breach.

"This is unacceptable and DOJ and OPM need to provide mope information about whether millions of current and former federal employees are at risk of their personal information being used for fraudulent purposes here in the U.S. or around the world," he wrote.

He said that the federal government was too slow in informing the public about the data breach in 2015.

In his July 9 letter, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd said that the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a press release on June 18 connecting the fraud case to the OPM data breach, when, in reality, that connection had not been established.

Several victims of the fraud scheme also were victims of the data breach, but, so far, the DoJ has not established a connection between the two, Boyd said.

In their guilty pleas, Cross and McKnight do not discuss how they obtained the identity information they used at the credit union.

Boyd said that after receiving several inquiries, the U.S. Attorney's office conducted an internal review of the case and issued a revised press release in an effort to clarify the record.