U.S. News: Ex-CIA Software Engineer Convicted of Leak

"A federal jury in New York convicted a former Central Intelligence Agency software engineer of leaking a trove of classified documents to the website WikiLeaks.

After a retrial lasting several weeks, the jury on Wednesday found Joshua Schulte, 33 years old, guilty of all nine counts he faced, including illegal gathering of national defense information.

The leak, which WikiLeaks dubbed Vault 7 and published in 2017, detailed how the CIA breaks into computers, smartphones, messaging applications and television sets. WikiLeaks said Vault 7 was the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.

The trial, in federal court in Manhattan, was Mr. Schulte's second related to this case. After his first trial, in March 2020, a different federal jury convicted him of making false statements and contempt of court but said it was deadlocked on the remaining counts.

Mr. Schulte faces a separate trial on child-pornography charges. He has pleaded not guilty to those counts.

After the verdict, Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Mr. Schulte had been convicted of one of the most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in American history. He said Mr. Schulte had access to "some of the country's most valuable intelligence-gathering cyber tools used to battle terrorist organizations and other malign influences around the globe."

A lawyer assisting Mr. Schulte, who represented himself, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the verdict.

Prosecutors said that in 2016, Mr. Schulte stole classified information from the CIA and transmitted it to WikiLeaks. He then lied to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, falsely denying being involved in the leak, they said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Lockard said during his closing argument that Mr. Schulte was a ticking time bomb who wanted to prove his superiority and punish people he believed had wronged him.

Mr. Schulte argued the government didn't have sufficient evidence to prove his guilt. He called prosecutors' argument that he was motivated by revenge "pure fantasy," and said that while he was argumentative, he wasn't angry." [1]

1. U.S. News: Ex-CIA Software Engineer Convicted of Leak
Ramey, Corinne. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 14 July 2022: A.3.