Joshua Schulte

Early life and education Schulte grew up in Lubbock, Texas, with three younger brothers. His father, Roger, is a financial adviser and his mother, Deanna, is a high-school guidance counselor. He was fascinated by computers as a child, and by the time he was in high school, had begun building them. According to former classmates, Schulte was infamous for drawing swastikas around school and in the yearbook of a Jewish student. Some former students recalled Schulte exposing his genitals and trying to touch others or get them to touch him. On one occasion, he and some of his friends got in trouble for trying to put their hands into the pants of a sleeping female student on a bus during a field trip.

Schulte graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2011 with a degree in computer engineering. According to his LinkedIn profile, he began working for the CIA in May 2010 and was "employed within the National Clandestine Service (NCS) as a Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) Intelligence Officer." After his arrest, it was revealed he had been a software engineer at the classified Operations Support Branch (OSB) at a secret CIA cyber facility in Virginia. Schulte was infuriated that he had to switch desks. After he filed for a restraining order against the other employee, the CIA's Threat Management Unit separated them further. His manager said Schulte refused to work from his new desk. worked as a senior software engineer for Bloomberg LP.

Leaks of classified information In 2013, Schulte posted snippets of code from OSB Project Wizard on his public GitHub page. A description of the same project name and purpose appeared in the Vault 7 release. According to The Daily Beast, it was unclear whether the project was developed externally and brought into OSB, or developed internally and exported to GitHub. In February 2014, Schulte uploaded at least five copies of Project Wizard to his public website. web browsers, and popular operating systems. Schulte had not returned his special black government passport when he left the CIA and was scheduled to fly to Mexico days later, but was stopped when the FBI confiscated his passport.

On May 15, 2018, both The Washington Post and The New York Times published articles about Schulte being a suspect in a federal investigation concerning the unauthorized disclosure of classified information to WikiLeaks.

On June 18, 2018, a grand jury issued a superseding indictment, adding ten more counts to the original three: illegal gathering of national defense information, illegal transmission of lawfully possessed national defense information, illegal transmission of unlawfully possessed national defense information, unauthorized access to a computer to obtain classified information, theft of government property, unauthorized access to a computer to obtain information from a department or agency of the United States, causing transmission of a harmful computer program, information, code, or command, making false statements, obstruction of justice, and criminal copyright infringement.

An additional superseding indictment was issued on October 31, 2018, that added two more charges—contempt of court, and illegal transmission and attempted transmission of unlawfully possessed national defense information—bringing the total to 15. In a letter to the court later that day, the government wrote that in early October 2018 Schulte had been discovered using "one or more smuggled contraband cellphones to communicate clandestinely with third parties" outside of New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he was being held, and that the grand jury had issued "dozens of subpoenas and pen register orders" revealing that Schulte was using "approximately 13 email and social media accounts (including encrypted email accounts)." The social media accounts included a Twitter account under the name Jason Bourne, which Schulte had used to draft tweets about CIA cyber tools.

According to a letter written by prosecutors in January 2020, one of Schulte's seized notebooks contained the phrase "DL Disc. UL WL", which they argued was a reference to "download discovery" and "upload to WikiLeaks".

Sex crimes During a raid of Schulte's Manhattan apartment on March 15, 2017, as well as at least one more on March 23, 2017, federal agents confiscated approximately 60 electronic devices, including a desktop computer locked under three layers of encryption. where investigators discovered a single classified document as well as over 10,000 images and videos depicting child pornography, including "sadistic and masochistic images and videos of children as young as a few years old who had been brutally sexually assaulted."

The government argued that Schulte was "both a flight risk and a danger to the community." Defense counsel countered that Schulte "had no basis of knowing if there's any alleged child pornography or had any reason to believe that he was in any way, shape or form in contact with any child pornography." The court concluded that Schulte's contention that he had been victimized by people who used his servers to store child pornography without his knowledge or consent "just doesn't seem likely" and ordered that he be detained. A week later, he entered a plea of not guilty, and he was released on bail two days later.

When the government searched Schulte's phone, they found a photograph taken inside the bathroom of his old home. The picture showed an unconscious woman whose underwear had been removed and whose genitals were being touched. She was not publicly named, but was identified as Schulte's roommate at the time. She informed investigators that she passed out one night with no memory of what happened, and that the photograph was not consensual.

On December 14, 2017, Senior U.S. District Judge Paul A. Crotty revoked bail in New York and had Schulte remanded to the custody of the United States Marshal of the Southern District of New York. Schulte has since been detained at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.

In October 2022, the FBI found approximately 2,400 files on Schulte's discovery laptop containing child sexual abuse material.

Trials

Leaks of classified information trials Schulte's trial on charges of disclosing classified information to WikiLeaks, after allegedly stealing it from the secretive CIA unit where he worked, began in New York on February 4, 2020, with opening statements by the respective sides. Federal prosecutors asserted that Schulte committed "the single biggest leak of classified national defense information in the history of the CIA" to take revenge on his former colleagues and bosses. Schulte's lead defense attorney, Sabrina Shroff, told jurors that her client was "a pain in the ass to everyone at the CIA", but argued that "being a difficult employee does not make you a criminal." Schulte pleaded not guilty. Using the contraband cellphone, he told a journalist he was a member of Anonymous and created encrypted email accounts and secret social media accounts. He wrote articles that prosecutors said were misleading and contained misinformation and classified information. The notebook also contained a note to his lawyers that said "if you need help ask WikiLeaks for my code."

Schulte faced a separate federal trial on charges of possessing child pornography.

Retrial During the retrial, Schulte represented himself, a decision that has been attributed to his belief that he could do a better job than his lawyers, the case's digital forensics, and his desire to have access to a computer and let the jury get to know him without having to testify. During the retrial, prosecutors said that Schulte was requesting access to a far larger cache of heavily classified information than he was accused of leaking. In an interview after the trial, one of the jurors said that Schulte seemed arrogant and acted like he thought he was better than everyone else. The New Yorker summarized the juror's description as, "Schulte's caustic belittling of one witness after another came to sound like the eye-rolling derision of a smug I.T. guy lording his technical prowess over everyone he encounters." The jurors were unaware of the child pornography charges.

Sex crimes trials

Child pornography trial On September 6, 2017, a grand jury in the Southern District of New York indicted Schulte on suspicion of receipt of child pornography, possession of child pornography, and transportation of child pornography.

On February 1, 2024, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison and lifetime supervised release for espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI, and possession of child abuse images.

Sentencing Schulte was imprisoned in Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York and Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn. In his sentencing letter, Schulte's defense lawyer César de Castro argued that Schulte was subjected for almost five years to "unconscionably punitive conditions" while being detained under "physically and psychologically torturous" Special Administrative Measures. Schulte called the prison "New York City’s very own Auschwitz", which Judge Furman called 'offensive'. Furman sentenced Schulte to 400 months imprisonment on the espionage counts and separately to 80 months for child pornography counts.