A former active-duty U.S. Army sergeant and intelligence analyst has pleaded guilty to federal charges related to a conspiracy in which he allegedly traded military secrets for cash, according to authorities.
The Justice Department announced Korbein Schultz’s guilty plea in a press release on Tuesday. It comes five months after his arrest at his post at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, and less than a month after he alerted the court that he wished to change his initial plea of not guilty.
Just prior to his arrest, a federal grand jury indicted Schultz on charges of conspiring to obtain and disclose military 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.
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Prosecutors have accused him of working with a co-conspirator in Hong Kong since June 2022 to “disclose documents, writings, plans, maps, notes, and photographs relating to national defense as well as information relating to national defense.” Some of the information included materials on advanced military helicopters, defensive missile systems, and Chinese military tactics, prosecutors said.
Schultz, who had top-secret security clearance, knew that this information “could be used to injure the United States or used to the advantage of a foreign nation,” a court filing alleges. But he took cash for the materials he handed over—about $42,000 over 14 payments.
“I will just keep sending you an abundance of information,” he texted his contact in August 2022. Later that month, he expressed a wish to be like Jason Bourne, the fictional CIA assassin played by Matt Damon.
“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,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said in a statement.
“Governments like China are aggressively targeting our military personnel and national security information and we will do everything in our power to ensure that information is safeguarded from hostile foreign governments,” FBI Executive Assistant Director Robert Wells added.
