Former CIA engineer charged with leaking classified information to WikiLeaks

The Justice Department on Monday announced charges against a former CIA computer engineer for allegedly leaking top-secret information on U.S. government hacking tools to WikiLeaks.

In a 13-count superseding indictment, the agency charged Joshua Adam Schulte with illegally gathering classified national defense information and transmitting it to “an organization.” WikiLeaks published the data in March of last year.

“Schulte utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims,” FBI official William Sweeney Jr. said in the release. “As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of Classified Information.”

{mosads}Prosecutors identified Schulte as a suspect in the leak last month, but did not yet have sufficient evidence to bring charges.

The Justice Department did not name WikiLeaks in a press release about the indictment, but attorneys involved in a child pornography case involving Schulte revealed earlier this year that the 29-year-old was the focus of an investigation into WikiLeaks’s dispersal of classified CIA information.

Schulte is currently in custody on child pornography charges, and is suspected to be behind the leak of CIA information to WIkiLeaks known as “Vault 7,” believed to be one of the largest unauthorized releases of CIA information in history.

The indictment also charges Schulte with lying to investigators, obstruction of justice, theft of government property and transmitting a harmful computer program.