Joshua Schulte

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

WikiLeaks published the documents as Vault 7, which The New York Times called "the largest loss of classified documents in the agency's history and a huge embarrassment for C.I.A. officials."

After his conviction, the Department of Justice called it "one of the most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in American history."

On September 13, 2023, Schulte was also convicted of receiving, possessing, and transporting child sexual abuse images.

On February 1, 2024, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison for espionage and child pornography.

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.

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.

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.

The OSB built "quick-reaction tools" based on ideas and prototypes for almost immediate use in missions.

Schulte graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2011 with a degree in computer engineering.

While studying at the University of Texas, he began an internship for IBM.

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.

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, 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.

In February 2014, Schulte uploaded at least five copies of Project Wizard to his public website.

After Schulte showed his skills as a programmer, he was made a system administrator for the CIA's developer network, Devlan, in 2015.

This gave him access to the network storing the source for OSB projects, and he could control who else had access.

Schulte's unit at the OSB was very social, and coworkers gave each other nicknames.

Schulte tried to give himself the nickname "Bad Ass", but others called him "Voldemort", and his temper earned him the nickname "the Nuclear Option".

He and other employees had Nerf wars at work, which sometimes escalated.

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.

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

According to testimony, an investigation found Schulte's claims to be meritless.

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.

According to the CIA's Office of Security, Schulte's "escalating behavior" kept "going on and on".

The prosecution alleged that Schulte was motivated by spite and revenge to steal backup files on April 20, 2016.

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

On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish content code-named "Vault 7".

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.

Later that day, the government "alerted the court to a violation, a potential breach of the protective order" in which "various search warrants and search warrant affidavits" were leaked to the press.