A federal judge Wednesday scheduled a retrial in the U.S. government’s case against Joshua Adam Schulte, a former CIA engineer accused of leaking top-secret hacking tools to the Wikileaks website.
U.S. District Court Judge Paul A. Crotty ordered Schulte’s retrial to start June 7, 2021, setting the stage for the legal proceedings to take place more than four years after the leak occurred.
Schulte, 32, is suspected of providing WikiLeaks with a trove of sensitive CIA material, including details about the agency’s top-secret hacking tools, released by the site beginning in March 2017.
He was charged later that year with counts of child pornography, pleaded not guilty and was released on bail, but he was taken back into custody soon afterward and ultimately charged over the leak.
Schulte was tried earlier this year in court on charges related to allegedly leaking the CIA tools, as well as classified material about his case received by reporters while he was in custody.
His jury deadlocked on most of the charges, however, and Judge Crotty, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, declared a mistrial, paving the way for prosecutors to seek a retrial.
Schulte was subsequently indicted once again in June in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on nine criminal counts involving allegedly leaking the CIA and case materials.
He will have been in federal custody for around 3.5 years by the time his retrial starts assuming it takes place as scheduled. He has pleaded not guilty.
Schulte is accused of leaking CIA tools later released online by WikiLeaks under the name “Vault 7.” The U.S. Department of Justice has previously called the disclosure’s impact “catastrophic.”
He faces charges including counts of of illegally accessing, gathering and transmitting national defense information, obstruction, accessing a computer without authorization and transmitting harmful computer code.
WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange was arrested and charged last year in London on charges related to his role overseeing the website but not directly over the “Vault 7” material.
Assange, a 49-year-old Australian, has been jailed in London for nearly 19 months while a British court weighs a U.S. extradition request. A decision is scheduled to be delivered in January 2021.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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