Ex-CIA Engineer Sentenced to 40 Years for WikiLeaks Leaks

Ex-CIA Engineer Sentenced to 40 Years for WikiLeaks Leaks: A former CIA software engineer was given a 40-year prison sentence on Thursday after being found guilty of having child sexual abuse photos and movies and stealing what the government called the largest amount of classified information in CIA history.

Joshua Schulte, 35, got most of his term in Manhattan federal court for letting WikiLeaks leak a bunch of embarrassing CIA secrets to the public in 2017. He’s been in jail since 2018.

Ex-CIA Engineer Sentenced to 40 Years for WikiLeaks Leaks

“We will likely never know the full extent of the damage, but I have no doubt it was massive,” Judge Jesse M. Furman said as he announced the sentence.

The so-called “Vault 7 leak” showed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android phones to spy on people in other countries and try to hack internet-connected TVs to listen in on conversations. Before he was caught, Schulte worked as a coder at the agency’s main office in Langley, Virginia, where he helped make the hacking tools.

This is what Assistant U.S. Attorney David William Denton Jr. said about Schulte when he asked for a life sentence: “the most damaging disclosures of classified information in American history.”

When Schulte was given a chance to talk, he mostly whined about how bad things were at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. He called his cell “My torture cage.”

But he also said that the prosecutors had once offered him a plea deal that would have given him 10 years in jail and that it was unfair for them to now want a life sentence. He said that he didn’t agree with the deal because it meant giving up his right to appeal.

“This is not justice the government seeks, but vengeance,” Schulte said. The judge then said that some of Schulte’s 30-minute speech was inappropriate and that he was “blown away” by Schulte’s “complete lack of remorse and acceptance of responsibility.”

Schulte was “not driven by any sense of altruism,” the judge said. Instead, he was “motivated by anger, spite, and perceived grievance” against people at the agency who he thought had ignored his complaints about the work environment.

Schulte continued to break the law while he was in jail, according to Furman. He tried to leak more secret information and made a hidden file on his computer with 2,400 pictures of child sexual abuse that he looked at while he was in jail.

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What else lies ahead?

As the two-hour hearing went on, Furman read from a one-page letter sent by the government from CIA Deputy Director David S. Cohen, who said Schulte’s crimes caused “exceptionally grave harm to U.S. national security and the CIA.”

He also said, “His actions cost the Agency hundreds of millions of dollars; degraded its ability to collect foreign intelligence against America’s adversaries; placed directly at risk CIA personnel, programs, and assets; and jeopardized U.S. national security by degrading the CIA’s ability to conduct its mission. In short, Mr. Schulte’s actions inflicted heavy costs on the United States.”

Schulte’s first trial in 2020 ended in a mistrial because the jury couldn’t agree on the most serious charges, such as illegally gathering and sending national defense information. He was found guilty of the charges against him in July 2022, which were related to the secret leak.

He was found guilty in the child sexual abuse case last fall. The case started when Schulte’s computer, which he had after leaving the CIA and moving from Virginia to New York, was found to have pictures and videos of sexual abuse of children that he had gotten from the internet between 2009 and March 2017.

That trial was called “a bloodbath” by the judge, and “Mr. Schulte had no defense.”

Furman pointed out that Schulte also couldn’t say sorry for those acts.

“When the FBI caught him,” Williams continued, “Schulte doubled down and tried to cause even more harm to this nation by waging what he describe as an ‘information’ war’ of publishing top secret information from behind bars.”

Furman said that most of the 40-year punishment was for stealing from the CIA, while the other six years and eight months were for being found guilty of child sexual abuse materials.

After the trial, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said that Schulte “betrayed his country by committing some of the most brazen, heinous crimes of espionage in American history.”

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