A federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted a Army veteran will leaking classified information to a journalist. File Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo
April 9 (UPI) — Federal authorities have arrested and charged an Army veteran with top secret clearance on accusations of sharing classified national defense information with a journalist, who is accusing the Trump administration of retaliating against a whistleblower.
Courtney Williams, 40, of Wagram, N.C., was indicted by a grand jury Wednesday, a day after she was arrested by the FBI, the Justice Department said in a statement.
She has been charged under the Espionage Act with one count of willful transmission of national defense information, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment if convicted.
Williams is a named source in Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, an investigative nonfiction book about a string of unsolved murders at the special operations base that was published in August.
In a book excerpt published by Politico, Williams alleges sexual harassment and discrimination within Delta Force at the North Carolina base.
She worked for the special military unit and held top secret clearance from 2010 to 2016 and was accused of leaking classified information to Harp between 2022 and last year.
Federal prosecutors, who did not name Harp, said Williams repeatedly spoke with the journalist, and had spoken over the phone for more than 10 hours and exchanged more than 180 messages.
On the August day the Politico article was published, Williams allegedly exchanged several messages with Harp, including one where she stated she was “concerned about the amount of classified information being disclosed,” and another expressing worry about potentially being arrested,” the Justice Department said.
Federal prosecutors also alleged that she disclosed national defense information on social media.
Harp issued a statement lambasting the Justice Department over its indictment against Williams, stating that not only was it filled with inaccuracies, but it also “has not specified what that allegedly classified ‘national defense information’ was.”
“Is it classified that many Delta Force operators and officers sexually harass and discriminate against women in the workplace? Because that was the main thrust of Courtney’s testimony,” he said in a statement.
“I am confident that the DOJ’s slapdash indictment, full of misleadingly juxtaposed quotations taken out of context, will fall apart upon careful scrutiny.”
FBI Director Kash Patel praised the FBI field office in Charlotte, the FBI Counterintelligence and Espionage Division and the Justice Department for their “outstanding work” in the case.
“Let this serve as a message to any would-be leakers: We’re working these cases, and we’re making arrests,” he said in a social media statement.
“This FBI will not tolerate those who seek to betray our country and put Americans in harm’s way.”
In response, Harp criticized the federal law enforcement agency.
“The FBI is incapable of solving real crimes, like all the murders on Fort Bragg involving elite soldiers trafficking drugs, so they settle for retaliating against courageous whistleblowers like Courtney Williams, whose only ‘crime’ was telling the truth about Delta Force,” he said on X.
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