FBI probes ex-CIA employee over hacking tools leak

A former CIA employee jailed on child pornography charges is being investigated. (Shutterstock)

• Joshua Adam Schulte remains a target of an ongoing investigation into the theft of the tools that were used by the agency to spy overseas
• WikiLeaks began releasing some of the CIA’s hacking tools in March 2017

WASHINGTON: The FBI has been investigating whether a former CIA employee jailed on child pornography charges is also tied to a massive leak of cyberhacking tools, according to court documents reviewed Tuesday by The Associated Press.
Government prosecutors say Joshua Adam Schulte remains a target of an ongoing investigation into the theft of the tools that were used by the agency to spy overseas. No charges have been filed against him, and his defense lawyers have insisted he was not involved.
Schulte’s name was first reported Tuesday by The Washington Post.
The CIA declined to comment.
His current federal defender, Sabrina Shroff, did not return a phone message seeking comment.
WikiLeaks began releasing some of the CIA’s hacking tools in March 2017. The US government has all but publicly acknowledged the embarrassing leak from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence. President Donald Trump told a television host then, “I just want people to know the CIA was hacked, and a lot of things taken.”
At a January hearing in a case involving child pornography charges filed against Schulte, Matthew Laroche, an assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York, said the material was taken from the CIA during a time when Schulte worked for the agency.
“The government immediately had enough evidence to establish that he was a target of that investigation,” Laroche said. “They conducted a number of search warrants on the defendant’s residence.”
Laroche said he disagreed with Schulte’s lawyer at the time, who claimed the search warrants had not yielded anything consistent with the material released by WikiLeaks. “In fact, our investigation is ongoing,” Laroche said. “He remains a target of that investigation.”
Schultz, of New York, currently is detained at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.
Jacob Kaplan, Schulte’s attorney at the January hearing, told the court that “the government had full access to his computers and his phone, and they found the child pornography in this case, but what they didn’t find was any connection to the WikiLeaks investigation.”