Accused CIA Leaker Faces New Charges of Leaking Information From Prison

Joshua Adam Schulte, a 30-year-old former CIA computer
programmer who was indicted over four
months ago for masterminding the largest leak of
classified information in the agency’s history, has now been
issued three new charges.

The news comes just hours after Schulte wrote a letter^[3] to the federal judge
presiding over his case, accusing officials at Manhattan
Metropolitan Correctional Center of interfering with his case
pleading and subjecting him to “cruel and unusual punishment” in
pre-trial detention.

Schulte, who once designed hacking tools and
malware for both the CIA and NSA to break into adversaries
computers, was arrested in August 2017 and initially charged with
possession and transportation of child pornography.
It wasn’t until June 2018 that US prosecutors had been able to
bring a 13-count superseding indictment against him, alleging theft
of over 8,000 classified
CIA documents and leaking them to
WikiLeaks, who then published the classified information last
year under the name “Vault 7.”

EX-CIA Joshua Adam Schulte Faces New Charges

Now, federal prosecutors have added three new charges against
Schulte in a rewritten indictment filed in Manhattan federal court
in New York on Wednesday with alleged further attempts to leak
information related to his case.

The three new charges against Schulte involved the unlawful
transmission and attempted illegal transmission of classified
national defense secrets from prison, along with a contempt
violation.

According to prosecutors, Schulte had been using one or more
smuggled cellphones to communicate covertly with individuals
outside the prison.

Prosecutors say after an FBI search into his jail cell found
multiple devices, including one encrypted device, with 13 email and
social media accounts, the government investigated them which
revealed that he had sent classified information to third parties,
including via an encrypted email account.

Schulte wrote a handwritten submission to the judge after he was
moved to an isolated part of the correctional center on October 1,
saying “this entire case is a lie.”

Schulte has pleaded not guilty to the previous charges related to
child pornography and disclosure of the classified information,
and has repeatedly denied any of his involvement in the Vault
7 case.

The Vault 7 release was one of the most significant leaks in the
CIA’s history, exposing secret cyber weapons and spying techniques
that the United States used to monitor or break into computers^[8], mobile
phones^[9], televisions^[10], webcams^[11], video
streams^[12], and more.

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