Feds ID suspect in leak of CIA hacking arsenal

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government has identified a suspect in the leak last year of a large portion of the CIA’s computer hacking arsenal, the cyber tools the agency had used to conduct espionage operations overseas, according to interviews and public documents.

But despite months of investigation, prosecutors have been unable to bring charges against the man, who is a former CIA employee currently being held in a Manhattan jail on unrelated charges.

Joshua Adam Schulte, 29, who worked for a CIA group that designs computer code to spy on foreign adversaries, is believed to have provided the agency’s top-secret information to WikiLeaks, federal prosecutors acknowledged in a hearing in January. The group published the code under the label “Vault 7” in March 2017. It was one of the most significantleaks in the CIA’s history, exposing secret cyber weapons and spying techniques that also might be used against the United States, according to intelligence officials.

Schulte’s connection to the leak investigation hasn’t been previously reported.

Federal authorities searched Schulte’s apartment in New York last year and obtained personal computer equipment, notebooks and hand-written notes according to a copy of the search warrant reviewed by The Washington Post. But that failed to provide evidence prosecutors needed to indict Schulte with leaking the information to WikiLeaks.

“Those search warrants haven’t yielded anything that is consistent with (Schulte’s) involvement in that disclosure,” Matthew Laroche, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, said at a hearing on Jan. 8, according to a court transcript.

Laroche said at the time that the investigation “is ongoing,” and that Schulte “remains a target of that investigation.”

Schulte’s attorneys have maintained that he played no role in the Vault 7 leaks.

Schulte is in a Manhattan jail on charges of possessing, receiving and transporting child pornography, according to an indictment filed last September. He has pleaded not guilty.

A former federal prosecutor, who is not connected to the case, said that it’s not unusual to hold a suspect in one crime on unrelated charges, and that the months Schulte has spent in jail doesn’t necessarily mean the government’s case has hit a wall. The former prosecutor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open investigation, also said that if government lawyers acknowledged in a public hearing that Schulte was a target, they probably believe he acted alone. The CIA declined to comment.

Schulte said in the statement that he joined the intelligence community to fulfill what he saw as a patriotic duty to respond to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Schulte also claimed that he reported “incompetent management and bureaucracy” at the CIA to both that agency’s inspector general as well as a congressional oversight committee. That painted him as a disgruntled employee, he said, and when he left the CIA in 2016, suspicion fell upon him as “the only one to have recently departed on poor terms,” Schulte wrote.