Former CIA employee convicted of espionage

A federal jury in Manhattan on Wednesday convicted Joshua Schulte, 33, on nine charges related to leaking information to WikiLeaks in 2017 about the tools the CIA uses to gather intelligence. His first round in court over the “Vault 7 leak” ended in a mistrial in 2020. The U.S. accused the software engineer of leaking more than 8,000 documents on how the agency hacked smartphones and internet-connected TVs for spy operations. Prosecutors said Schulte was trying to destroy the agency because he was unhappy with his working conditions. They called it one of the biggest intelligence leaks in American history.

What was his defense? Schulte chose to represent himself in the retrial and told the jurors that the CIA was looking for a scapegoat for an embarrassing mistake. He said he was one of many software engineers working on the technology and there was plenty of reasonable doubt. He has also been accused of possessing child pornography and pleaded not guilty. That separate trial will begin at a later date.

Dig deeper: Listen to Sarah Schweinsberg’s report in The World and Everything in It podcast on how intelligence agencies have changed since 9/11.