Retrial of Former CIA Coder’s Alleged WikiLeaks Involvement is Underway

In March 2017, the international repository for news leaks and classified media known as WikiLeaks published a series of confidential information from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) comprised of 2 billion pages of documents stolen from the agency. Before a jury this past week, Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA) David Denton argued that former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte, age 33, is the anonymous source of the leaked classified materials.

“There was no misguided idealism here; he did it because he was angry and disgruntled,” AUSA Denton informed jurors. “He felt the CIA had slighted him and disrespected him, so he tried to burn to the ground the very cyber-intelligence work that he had was once been part of.”

In his opening statement, Schulte—who is defending himself with the assistance of counsel—said the CIA was unaware of the compromised servers for a year. Schulte further stated that the leaked materials were stored on servers that programmers nicknamed “the wild, wild west” because of their precarious nature.

According to the defendant, the government built a case against him that was virtually impossible to prove and  the CIA decided to use him as a scapegoat because of a dispute he had with agency leadership coinciding with his resignation following the hack.

Federal agents initially detained Schulte in November 2017, not because of the CIA hack, but on child pornography charges which led to his initial detention where he has remained for five years. As previously reported in FEDagent, the Justice Department announced in June 2018 a 13-count superseding indictment concerning Schulte's alleged theft of classified information. The first trial under these charges resulted in a hung jury on eight espionage counts, but the jury convicted Schulte on a contempt of court charge and making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty ultimately declared a mistrial and authorized a $250,000 bail, allowing the government to retry the case. The bail was revoked after he was arrested in December 2018 from an unrelated sexual assault charge in Virginia.

This retrial in the Southern District of New York is expected to up five weeks and will feature testimony from Schulte and federal agents. Schulte faces the child-pornography charges, which carry a 20-year maximum sentence, in a separate trial.