Ex-CIA Engineer Goes on Trial for Massive Leak

Joshua Schulte allegedly gave WikiLeaks a trove of documents revealing secret hacking programs

By Rebecca Davis O’Brien

Feb. 3, 2020 9:45 am ET

A former software engineer for the Central Intelligence Agency is set to go to trial Monday in Manhattan federal court on charges that he leaked a trove of classified information about the CIA’s hacking operations to WikiLeaks, leading to one of the largest breaches in the agency’s history.

In 2017, WikiLeaks released more than 8,000 pages of secret materials—which the antisecrecy organization called “Vault 7”—detailing the CIA’s cyberespionage arsenal, including the agency’s playbook for hacking smartphones, computer operating systems, messaging applications and internet-connected televisions.

Federal prosecutors say the defendant, Joshua Schulte, stole the documents when he worked in a CIA unit that designed the hacking tools.

Mr. Schulte, 31 years old, faces 11 criminal counts, including illegal gathering and transmission of national defense information—charges that derive from the Espionage Act, a statute that has been applied in other WikiLeaks cases. Some of the charges relate to Mr. Schulte’s alleged misconduct and obstruction following his 2017 arrest—prosecutors say he lied to law enforcement and disobeyed court orders.

Mr. Schulte and his lawyers have called the espionage charges vague and overreaching, saying they infringed on constitutional free-speech rights. They have alleged fatal errors in the government’s case, objected to the secrecy shrouding the investigation and protested Mr. Schulte’s isolated confinement in a Manhattan jail.

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