A former CIA employee was sentenced to 40 years in prison after carrying out the largest data leak in the agency’s history, the US Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York announced Thursday.
Joshua Schulte – who was accused of handing over reams of classified data to WikiLeaks in 2016 – was convicted in 2022 of illegally gathering and transmitting national defense information and obstructing a criminal investigation and grand jury proceeding, among other charges. He was also found guilty in 2023 of receiving, possessing and transporting child pornography, according to the US Attorney’s Office.
He had worked as a computer engineer within the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, and created cyber tools that could grab data undetected from computers. Schulte defended himself at trial. An earlier trial ended in a hung jury in 2020.
“Joshua Schulte betrayed his country by committing some of the most brazen, heinous crimes of espionage in American history,” US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. “He caused untold damage to our national security in his quest for revenge against the CIA for its response to Schulte’s security breaches while employed there.”
“When the FBI caught him, Schulte doubled down and tried to cause even more harm to this nation by waging what he described as an ‘information war’ of publishing top secret information from behind bars,” Williams added. “And all the while, Schulte collected thousands upon thousands of videos and images of children being subjected to sickening abuse for his own personal gratification.”
“Today, Joshua Schulte was rightly punished not only for his betrayal of our country, but for his substantial possession of horrific child pornographic material,” FBI…
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