The second federal trial of former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte on espionage charges began on Tuesday in a New York court with opening statements by the prosecution and the defendant telling the jury he was innocent and the victim of a political witch-hunt.
Schulte, 33, was charged in June 2018 with 13 counts and accused of stealing and leaking a trove of CIA cyberespionage tools known as “Vault 7” to WikiLeaks, which published them in March 2017. His first trial in 2020 ended with a hung jury on eight espionage counts, but Schulte was convicted on a lesser contempt of court charge and another charge of making false statements to the FBI.
Schulte, who is representing himself in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, told the jury that the evidence will “absolutely prove my innocence.” He said the leak of 7,000 pages and millions of lines of malware code, developed by the CIA for hacking smartphones and other consumer devices such as smart TVs, was the result of the government’s “wildly insecure” intelligence servers.
— source wsws.org | Kevin Reed | 15 Jun 2022
