Joshua Schulte

Joshua Schulte   (whistleblower)
Born	Joshua Adam Schulte 25 September 1988

Joshua Adam Schulte is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who is suspected of being involved in a leak of classified documents ("Vault 7") to WikiLeaks, which some have called "the largest loss of classified documents in the agency’s history and a huge embarrassment for CIA officials."

Arrest

Schulte was arrested in August 2017 on child pornography charges.

““Most Americans, most people in general, are idiots,””
Joshua Schulte (2008) 

Trial

In February 2020, nearly three years after WikiLeaks’ publishing of “Vault 7” content in March 2017, Schulte appeared in a federal court in Manhattan as his defence and the CIA’s prosecutors delivered their opening arguments.

David Denton, assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York, contended that Schulte had carried out the “ultimate act of betrayal” against the CIA and, according to a notebook recovered from his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, kept “a detailed battle plan” for his “information war,” reported the New York Daily News. The prosecution claimed Schulte clearly had a grudge against the agency and that he wrote “Top secret? F**k your top secret!” in his notebook.

Sabrina Shroff, Schulte’s defence attorney, argued that the 31-year-old was being made a scapegoat to cover up for the agency’s “wide open” system that stored the now-leaked information:

“After nearly three years, this massive CIA leak still remains a mystery,” she said, asserting that it was an open secret that the system was vulnerable. “Hundreds of people could have and did have the opportunity to take that information. The CIA went a whole year without knowing that their super-secure system had been hacked."

Schulte's first trial for the Vault 7 leaks ended in a hung jury. He represented himself in a retrial and was convicted on all 9 counts related to those leaks on July 13, 2022 in what the New Yorker describes as a "persuasive case," laid out by the government against Schulte, telling of a hotheaded prankster, Schulte, who was nicknamed 'Nuclear Option," following objections he had to some of the code he had written being used for a contract project referred to as Almost Meat (whether this is a codename for something or a reference to an actual fake-meat company is not made clear).

The New Yorker says he was also nicknamed "Voldemort" by his colleagues for his reputation to take retaliatory office antics too far (One colleague describes how he and Schulte had spent an evening at work flinging rubberbands at eachother, eventually trashing eachother's desks and getting into a fist fight).

The story goes: Schulte had pilfered the Vault 7 leaks as the "ultimate act of revenge" against colleagus. Among the governments most compelling evidence against Schulte was a list of chores writtn by him that included the task "Delete suspicious emails.". In court, US Attorney, David Denton said of this revelation. “This is someone who’s hiding the things that he’s done wrong." Implying the "suspicious emails" Schulte wanted to delete were the ones containing the Vault 7 leaks, or information regarding them, to wikileaks. As opposed to using SecureDrop over Tor, as any person in Schulte's line of work would cetainly have been aware of following the Snowden leaks. Indeed, that wrong thing referred to by Denton must have been the largest data dump stolen from an American Intelligence Agency in US history.

“Prosecutors alleged Schulte was motivated to orchestrate the leak because he believed the CIA had disrespected him by ignoring his complaints about the work environment. So he tried “to burn to the ground” the very work he had helped the agency to create.”
The Associated Press (July 7, 2022) 

“[Schulte] had left the agency in November, 2016, and was said to have been disgruntled. He now lived in Manhattan, where he worked as a software engineer at Bloomberg. As Schulte was leaving the office one evening, Evanchec and another F.B.I. agent intercepted him. When they explained that they were investigating the leak, he agreed to talk. They went to a nearby restaurant, Pershing Square, opposite Grand Central Terminal. Schulte may not have realized it, but the other patrons seated around them were actually plainclothes F.B.I. agents, who were there to monitor the situation—and to intervene if he made any sudden moves. Schulte was amiable and chatty. But, when Evanchec looked down, 'he noticed that Schulte’s hands were shaking.'"”
Pat Radden Keefe (June 6, 2022) 

A separate trial in which Schulte is accused of possession of child pornography is ongoing, he has not been sentenced yet for the Vault 7 leaks, though the longest sentence he faces for any of th 9 crimes of which he was convicted is 10 years. Why a person with the technical formidability of Schulte, possessing child pornography, would engage in a such a risk-laden crime, and not even bother wiping hard drives in his possession containing such illegal porn , in case he was caught, remains a mystery.

Character Assasination

The New Yorker article cited above goes to great lengths in trying to make the case against Schulte in the court of public opinion.

The author of the article describes the convergence of old classmates of Schulte's on Facebook following public acknowledgement of his arrest. one Junior High classmate of Schulte's says he used to try and touch her and others with his exposed penis in band class.

“Other classmates recalled sexually inappropriate behavior. One woman told me that he had repeatedly exposed his penis to students when they were both in the junior-high band. “He would try and touch people, or get people to touch him—that was a daily occurrence,” she said. She loved music, but she was so intent on getting away from Schulte that she asked her parents to let her quit the band. She was too uncomfortable to explain to her parents exactly what had transpired. “It’s hard to put it into words,” she recalled. “You’re twelve. It’s just ‘Hey, this kid is super gross, and it makes me want to not be part of this school right now.’ ” Her parents, not grasping the gravity of what had happened, insisted that she remain in the band. “I was traumatized,” she told me. I also spoke to a friend of the woman, who remembered her recounting this behavior by Schulte at the time.”
New Yorker

Despite speaking to a friend who remembered the other friend "recounting" these incidents, this girl apparently never told her parents that a boy was trying to rub his penis on her and other students 'daily': “He would try and touch people, or get people to touch him—that was a daily occurrence,” No other band student who actually experienced this "daily" game of penis grab-ass could apparently be tracked down.

Another incident on a school bus is described second hand, and disputed by others who went to Junior high with Schulte as a misrepresentation of events.

An actual friend of Schulte's recounts that he once drew a swastika in his WWII notes in history class. Another claiming to be Schulte's "friend" in Junior High recounts that he drew swastikas "all over the place," and also that Schulte admitted to him once that he had exposed his penis to a girl at school (whether he brought this up without prompting from the New Yorker author is not clear). The same "friend" claims Schulte drew a swastika on a jewish students yearbook. According to the article, multiple (but not exactly how many) students recall Schulte drawing swastikas at school to get a rise out of people. Corroboration is lacking for all the other claims. How any of this alleged juvenile edgelord behavior relates to allegations that Schulte was responsible for the Vault 7 leaks is totally unclear.

Trial Transcripts

Transcripts of the trial proceedings are being purchased and posted online in an indexed library format by Alexa O'brien and the Calyx Institute

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Julian Assange denied access to lawyers, visitors in Britain’s Belmarsh prison	Article	24 April 2019	Oscar Grenfell	Chelsea Manning’s punitive detention is a warning of the treatment that will be meted out to Julian Assange if he is extradited to the US
Document:Julian Assange makes first public statement since prison release	blog post	1 October 2024	Andy Worthington	"Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroad. I fear that unless norm-setting institutions like PACE wake up to the gravity of the situation it will be too late. Let us all commit to doing our part to ensure that the light of freedom never dims, that the pursuit of truth will live on, and that the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few."

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Beaurocracy and Overclassification

“Even as F.B.I. investigators pinpointed Schulte as the prime suspect, their work was frustrated by the pageantry of overclassification. WikiLeaks had posted the Vault 7 tools on the Web, where anyone could see them, but officially the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. maintained that the documents remained classified. As a result, only investigators who held the necessary security clearances were permitted even to access WikiLeaks to see what had been stolen. F.B.I. officials were so nervous about visiting the Web site using Bureau computers or Internet connections (thereby possibly exposing their own networks to a cyber intrusion) that they dispatched an agent to purchase a new laptop and visit the Web site from the safety of a Starbucks. Once the Vault 7 materials had been downloaded from the Internet, the laptop itself became officially classified, and had to be stored in a secure location. But the evidence locker normally used by agents, which held drugs and other seized evidence, wouldn’t do, because it was classified only up to the Secret level. Instead, the investigators stored the laptop in a supervisor’s office, in a special safe that had been certified to hold Top Secret documents—even though anyone could go to the Internet to see the materials that were on it.”
New Yorker

References

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