Joshua Adam Schulte (born September 25, 1988) is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who was convicted of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.

[2] From January 2010 to May 2010, Schulte was employed as a systems engineer by the National Security Agency (NSA), including time spent within the Technology Directorate.

[2][10] 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.

"[11] 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.

A rubber-band war between Schulte and a coworker named Michael escalated until they were "trash[ing]" each other's desks and began throwing punches.

[2] Conflicts with another employee, which included Schulte making fat jokes and claiming the other had made death threats, led to both being reassigned.

[2] By November 2016, Schulte left the CIA to move to New York, and, until his arrest and detention on August 24, 2017,[2][13][14] worked as a senior software engineer for Bloomberg LP.

The confidential documents, dated from 2013 to 2016, included details on the CIA's software capabilities, such as the ability to compromise cars, smart TVs,[19] web browsers,[20][21][22] and popular operating systems.

[2][3][24] 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.

[28] 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).

Afterward, through technical analysis, agents retrieved passwords from his cell phone that unlocked multiple layers of encryption on his desktop computer,[34] 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.

"[2][3] Schulte called the possession of child pornography, with which he was charged, a "victimless crime",[2] and said the images and videos were not his, but had been uploaded without his knowledge by others onto a server he operated and let them host whatever they wanted on it.

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.

[37] As a result, on November 15, 2017, the Loudoun County Commonwealth's Attorney's Office determined that it had enough evidence based on pictures supplied by the FBI to charge Schulte with two crimes: object sexual penetration and the unlawful creation of an image of another.

[41][42] 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.

[43] 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."

[31][46] In a notebook later seized by officials, Schulte wrote that if the government didn't pay him $50 billion, he would try "to breakup diplomatic relationships, close embassies, and U.S. occupation across the world & finally reverse U.S. jingoism.

"[31] On March 9, 2020, after hearing four weeks of testimony and deliberating for six days, the jury convicted Schulte on two counts: contempt of court and making false statements to the FBI.

[2][50] 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.

At trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Schulte had over 3,000 encrypted images and videos of sexual abuse of children as young as age 2 on his home computer.

[8][53] 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.