Ex-CIA engineer convicted over biggest theft of classified information in agency history

Prosecutors said Joshua Schulte leaked materials because he was unhappy with how he was treated by CIA management

FILE - In this courtroom sketch, Joshua Schulte, center, is seated at the defense table flanked by his attorneys during jury deliberations, Wednesday March 4, 2020 (AP)

A former CIA software engineer has been convicted of the biggest ever theft of classified data in the agency’s history.

Joshua Schulte was accused of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks in 2016, and was found guilty by a jury in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday of eight espionage charges.

The 33-year-old coder had previously worked at the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence and developed tools that could take data undetected from computers.

Schulte defended himself at the New York City retrial after a 2020 trial ended in a hung jury.

“Schulte has been convicted for one of the most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in American history,” said US Attorney Damian Williams in a statement.

Prosecutors said that Schulte leaked the materials because he was unhappy at how he was treated by CIA management.

“There was no misguided idealism here; he did it because he was angry and disgruntled,” Assistant US Attorney David Denton told jurors at the case’s opening last month.

“He felt the CIA had slighted him and disrespected him, so he tried to burn to the ground the very cyberintelligence work that he had once been part of.”

The leaked materials, so-called the Vault 7 leak, included information on software the CIA uses to carry out surveillance on people outside the US via phones and Internet-connected TVs.

He resigned from the spy agency in November 2016 and WikiLeaks began to publish the leaked material on March 2017.

An anonymous CIA computer engineer testified in the 2020 trial that the leak was “crippling.”

Schulte was arrested in August 2017 on child pornography charges and has been behind bars since his bail was revoked four months after that.

A sentencing date has not been set but he faces a maximum prison sentence of 80 years.

Schulte will appear in court in two weeks for a status conference on the child pornography charges, which carry a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.