Former CIA Employee Charged in Connection with WikiLeaks
This week, the Department of Justice announced that former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) programmer Joshua Schulte, age 29, faces a 13-count superseding indictment concerning his alleged theft of classified national defense information and the transmission of that information, known as Organization-1, to a public organization.
Schulte was allegedly behind the Vault 7 trove of the agency’s hacking tools sent to WikiLeaks, which included exploits and documents for infecting iPhones, Wi-Fi routers, and Cisco switches, which represented the biggest-known loss of classified information in CIA history.
“As alleged, Schulte utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims. As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of classified information,” said Assistant Director-in-Charge William F. Sweeney, Jr.
Previously, Schulte worked as a systems engineer at the National Security Agency (NSA) before taking a job as a software engineer at the CIA in 2010, where he was employed for six years. Schulte then joined Bloomberg in 2016.
In a statement obtained by the Washington Post, Schulte said he joined the CIA to fulfill a patriotic mission to respond to the September 11 attacks of 2001. Later, he reported the CIA's "incompetent management and bureaucracy" to the CIA inspector general and a congressional oversight committee. Subsequent reports have portrayed Schulte as a disgruntled employee and suspicion fell on him as the only recent employee to leave the CIA engineering group on bad terms.
In a court transcript from January, federal agents disclosed that they had seized computers, phones, and unspecified top secret government information which immediately implicated Schulte in the leak investigation. However, despite being arrested more than a year ago, Schulte wasn't charged until this week for reasons that are still unclear.
Schulte attorneys maintain he had anything to do with the Vault 7 leak.