‘He violated his training and his oath as a member of the armed services and he compromised our national security,’ U.S. Attorney Henry C. Leventis said.
A U.S. Army intelligence analyst has pleaded guilty to charges that accuse him of selling military secrets to China for a total of $42,000, according to the Department of Justice.
Sgt. Korbein Schultz was an army intelligence analyst with the First Battalion of the 506th Infantry Regiment at Fort Campbell, an army installation on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. He was arrested at the military base in March after being indicted by a federal grand jury.
On Aug. 13, Schultz pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, exporting technical data related to defense articles without a license, conspiracy to export defense articles without a license, and bribery of a public official, the Justice Department (DOJ) said in a statement.
“The defendant abused his access to restricted government systems to sell sensitive military information to a person he knew to be a foreign national,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen of the DOJ’s National Security Division said in a statement.
“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.”
Schultz had held top secret/sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI) security clearance in the Army.
He was recruited by an individual who lived in Hong Kong and was identified only as “Conspirator A,” whom he suspected of being “associated with the Chinese government,” according to the DOJ.
The conspiracy started in 2022 until the time of his arrest, the indictment said, and the two used “multiple-based encrypted methods” to communicate.
Schultz handed over dozens of sensitive and restricted, but unclassified, military documents, including information on the HH-60 helicopter, F-22A fighter aircraft, the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, intercontinental ballistic missiles, the B-52 aircraft, the high mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS), and the terminal high altitude area defense (THAAD) system, according to the indictment.
