A former CIA programmer on trial for passing a trove of highly classified documents to WikiLeaks is a “pain in the ass,” but that doesn’t mean he’s guilty of treason, his lawyer said Tuesday in her opening statements.
“He was a difficult employee,” Sabrina Schroff told jurors of technician Joshua Schulte. “But being a difficult employee does not make you a criminal. Being a difficult employee does not make you a traitor. Being a difficult employee does not translate to someone who will sell out his country.”
Prosecutors claim the 30-year-old hacker was unhappy at work, and decided to breach servers and steal data about the CIA’s secret electronic surveillance programs as a twisted form of revenge.
The theft — which is considered the largest ever of classified information in the history of the CIA — went undetected for over a year until WikiLeaks published the materials on March 7, 2017.
Schroff painted her “computer nerd” client as an easy target, saying the government needed a scapegoat and Schulte left a trail of enemies in his wake at work.
“By all accounts he was talented, a talented CIA employee. He was also a pain in the ass to everyone in the agency,” she said. “But this case is not about whether or not you like Mr. Schulte.”
Meanwhile, Manhattan federal prosecutor Dave Denton said Tuesday that the former software engineer — who was part of an elite team of covert intelligence employees that worked in vaults literally protected by armed guards — began plotting a reprisal after a run-in with a colleague left him feeling shafted.
Denton told jurors the info dump was part of Schulte’s “spiral out of control, his quest for revenge.”
“The leak was instantly devastating,” Denton said. “Years of work and millions of dollars spent developing these tools went up in smoke.”
“For the CIA, it was the ultimate act of betrayal by one of their own,” he added.
The prosecutor also pointed to notebooks found in the hacker’s cell in which he’d scrawled “top secret, f–k your top secret” as evidence of his plot to start an “information war” that could break up diplomatic relations, close embassies and jeopardize people’s lives.
Schulte faces up to 10 years behind bars if convicted of charges including illegal gathering of national defense information.
He’s separately facing charges of receipt and transmission of child pornography, to which he’s pleaded not guilty.