NEW YORK: A former CIA software engineer was sentenced Thursday to 40 years in prison after being convicted of what the government called the largest theft of classified information in CIA history and possessing images and videos of child sexual abuse.
Much of the sentence handed down to Joshua Schulte, 35, in federal court in Manhattan, came for the embarrassing public release of a trove of CIA secrets by WikiLeaks in 2017. He has been incarcerated since 2018.
We will probably never know the full extent of the damages, but I have no doubt they were massive, Judge Jesse M. Furman said as he announced the sentence.
The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas espionage operations and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices. Before his arrest, Schulte helped build hacking tools as a coder at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
In seeking the life sentence, Deputy US Attorney David William Denton Jr. stated that Schulte was responsible for “the most damaging disclosures of classified information in American history.”
When Schulte was given a chance to speak, he mostly complained about the harsh conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, calling his cell “My torture cage.”
But he also argued that prosecutors once offered him a plea deal that would have required a 10-year prison sentence, and that it was unfair to ask them now for a life sentence. He said he objected to the deal because he would have to waive his right to appeal.
“The government is not looking for justice, it’s for revenge,” Schulte said.
Immediately afterward, the judge criticized some of Schulte’s half-hour remarks, saying he was “blown away” by Schulte’s “complete lack of remorse and acceptance of responsibility.”
The judge said Schulte was “not driven by any sense of altruism,” but instead was “motivated by anger, spite and perceived grievance” against others at the agency who he believed had ignored his complaints about the work environment.
Furman said Schulte continued his crimes from behind bars by trying to leak more classified material and creating a hidden file on his computer that contained 2,400 child sex abuse images, which he continued to view from prison.
During the two-hour proceeding, Furman noted a one-page letter forwarded by the government from CIA Deputy Director David S. Cohen that described Schulte’s crimes as causing “exceptionally serious harm to the national security of the United States and the CIA.”
In Schulte’s original trial in 2020, a mistrial was declared after jurors deadlocked on the most serious points, including the illegal collection and transmission of national defence information. He was convicted in July 2022 in connection with the classified information leak.
He was convicted last fall in a child sexual abuse image case that arose when it was discovered that a computer owned by Schulte after he left the CIA and moved from Virginia to New York contained images and videos he had downloaded from the Internet from 2009 to March 2017.
The judge described the trial as a “bloodbath” in which “Mr. Schulte had no defence.”
Yet, as Furman noted, Schulte was unable to express remorse even for these crimes.
Of the 40-year sentence, Furman said most of it was for stealing from the CIA, while six years and eight months of that was for convictions for child sexual abuse materials.
In a subsequent statement, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said Schulte “betrayed his country by committing some of the most brazen and heinous crimes of espionage in American history.”
“When the FBI caught him,” Williams continued, “Schulte doubled down and tried to do even more damage to this nation by waging what he describes as an ‘information’ war, releasing top secret information from behind bars.”
