A former CIA engineer was found guilty on Wednesday of the theft of a massive cache of information that was handed to WikiLeaks, the worst such breach in the agency’s history.
The case of Joshua Adam Schulte, who once worked for the CIA as a programmer, was described by the Justice Department as "one of the most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in American history."
Schulte was convicted on charges related to the theft of classified information from the CIA’s “Vault 7” which was then provided to Wikileaks who published the material, Fox News reported.
The former CIA staffer 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," US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said in a statement.
Williams said that Schulte “began to harbor resentment toward the CIA.”
“He covertly collected those tools and provided them to WikiLeaks, making some of our most critical intelligence tools known to the public – and therefore, our adversaries," Williams added.
"Moreover, Schulte was aware that the collateral damage of his retribution could pose an extraordinary threat to this nation if made public, rendering them essentially useless, having a devastating effect on our intelligence community by providing critical intelligence to those who wish to do us harm."
During the New York retrial, Schulte chose not to have a lawyer, defending himself. In his closing arguments, he told the jury that the CIA and FBI had decided to use him as a scapegoat for the leak of a huge cache of CIA and FBI documents by Wikileaks in 2017.
"Hundreds of people had access to [the information],” he said, describing how he had no motivation to do what he was accused of doing. “Hundreds of people could have stolen it."
But prosecutors claimed that the former CIA employee felt slighted and was upset at the CIA for not taking seriously work-related complaints.
In response, they alleged, he attempted to “burn to the ground” the work he had been a part of at the agency.