Shutting Off The Leaks

The Trump regie's relationship with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange has taken a decidedly sour turn now that our old buddy Vlad is using them to keep Trump in line, and Trump has decided that the "deep state" is useful to him after all when it serves his purposes.

Federal prosecutors charged a former CIA employee Monday with violations of the Espionage Act and related crimes in connection with the leak last year of a collection of hacking tools that the agency used for spy operations overseas.

Joshua Adam Schulte, who worked for a CIA group that designs computer code to spy on foreign adversaries, was charged in a 13-count superseding indictment with illegally gathering and transmitting national defense information and related counts in connection with what is considered to be one of the most significant leaks in CIA history.

The indictment accused Schulte of causing sensitive information to be transmitted to an organization that is not named in the indictment but is thought to be WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks posted the hacking tools online last year in a release it called “Vault 7.” Prosecutors alleged Schulte stole the information in 2016.

Schulte had long been a suspect of investigators exploring the leak, but before Monday, he had been held on separate child pornography charges. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a statement that investigators looking into Schulte found the pornography in his residence. His personal computer, federal prosecutors alleged, held more than 10,000 images and videos of such material, protected under three layers of passwords.

Schulte was arrested on charges stemming from the porn in August 2017.

“As alleged, Schulte utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims,” William F. Sweeney Jr., the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, said in a statement. “As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of Classified Information. To further endanger those around him, Schulte allegedly received, possessed, and transmitted thousands of child pornographic photos and videos.”

An attorney for Schulte did not respond to an email seeking comment Monday night. In a statement reviewed by The Washington Post previously, Schulte claimed that he reported “incompetent management and bureaucracy” at the CIA to the agency’s inspector general and to a congressional oversight committee. He asserted that cast him as disgruntled and that when he left the CIA, he became a suspect in the leak as “the only one to have recently departed [the CIA engineering group] on poor terms.”

The indictment accuses Schulte, 29, of exceeding his authorized access to CIA computer systems and altering systems to delete records of his activities and deny others access. Added together, the charges against him carry a statutory maximum penalty of 135 years in prison. Some officials have compared the leak of which he is accused to that of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who also revealed details about U.S. capabilities to spy on computers and phones around the world.

I've talked about WikiLeaks extensively on ZVTS as well as Julian Assange and their involvement with Russia as Putin's information clearing house, and how Russia has been yanking the strings of the website since Ed Snowden took his treasure trove to Moscow.

These guys were an integral part of Russia's operation to attack the 2016 US elections and help Donald Trump, and it worked better than anyone in Moscow could have hoped.  Now that WikiLeaks is a potential liability to Trump, or rather, now that Trump realizes that WikiLeaks was always going to be used against him by Putin, Trump is having the CIA go after the leakers.

We'll see where this goes, but my guess is that Schulte has already caused extensive damage to the CIA, meaning that both the NSA and CIA have been fatally compromised in the last several years, and Russia has reaped the benefit.  Like it or not, Putin has been holding all the cards on our counterintelligence services for quite some time now, and he has the Oval Office to boot.

Trump will at least go far enough to try to protect himself from WikiLeaks, but there's no way we can expect the US government to fix the massive Russian damage to the country with Trump at the helm.