Army intelligence analyst Korbein Schultz pleaded guilty this week to charges that he transmitted classified information to a Chinese national in exchange for money.
"The defendant abused his access to restricted government systems to sell sensitive military information to a person he knew to be a foreign national," said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. "By conspiring to transmit national defense information to a person living outside the United States, this defendant callously put our national security at risk to cash in on the trust our military placed in him."
According to the charging documents, Schultz held a Top Secret / Secure Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearance which allowed him access to American national defense secrets. At some point (the documents do not specify when) Schultz conspired with an individual in Hong Kong who he suspected of being associated with the Chinese government to sell classified documents for money.
Before his arrest, Schultz transmitted to the conspirator in Hong Kong sensitive but unclassified documents regarding a "variety of U.S. military weapons systems and U.S. military tactics and strategy, including documents containing export-controlled technical data."
Some examples of documents he transmitted include a "document discussing the lessons learned by the U.S. Army from the Ukraine/Russia war that it would apply in a defense of Taiwan" and an operations order outlining his unit's deployment to Eastern Europe. He also transmitted documents relating to missile defense, training exercises in Asia, military satellites, and a variety of manned and unmanned military aircraft.
Schultz is scheduled to be sentenced in January and faces up to 20 years in prison.