The lawyer for former CIA employee Joshua Schulte is
unhappy the spy agency is allowed to review communications with her
client before she receives it and has accused the agency of trying to
intimidate her.
Schulte's lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, appeared in a New
York court on Wednesday and argued that the CIA was abusing
client-attorney privilege as well as threatening her with future legal
repercussions for receiving confidential material.
"The CIA essentially has threatened us,” Shroff told
the judge. Asked whether the spy agency was also listening in on her
confidential conversations with her client, she responded: "We don't
know."
The CIA believes that Schulte was behind a massive leak of material from the spy agency that outlined how it is able to install
spy software on laptops and phones. But it has been unable to prove the
assertion.
Schulte is currently in jail on unrelated charges of
possession and distribution of child abuse images but the CIA has made
it plain he is the prime suspect in the information leak. Schulte was in
charge of a server that contained 54GB of illegal content but has pled
not guilty, arguing that he was running a public server and had no idea
about the images.
Thanks to his work for the CIA's engineering
development group and the spy agency's suspicions that he was behind the
leak, he and his lawyer have been put under extreme restrictions.
Schulte's lawyer has to make a request to meet with
him one week prior to any meeting. He is then transferred to a special
secure area that is monitored by CCTV before being strip-searched and
chained to the floor. His lawyer is not allowed to take in any equipment
and must use a government-supplied computer to review any material –
conditions imposed [PDF] by the judge.
But despite specific provisions that prevent jail
staff from recording any audio or sharing any information with the
prosecution, Shroff suspects the CIA is monitoring her meetings
regardless.
She is also frustrated that the court ordered that
any material produced by Schulte is first reviewed by the CIA before it
is supplied to her, and that the agency seems to be going out of its way
to delay access, as well as frustrate her efforts to provide him with a
defense.
"We are experiencing significant delay in the CIA's process of classifying our client’s work product," she wrote [PDF] to the judge in March, giving the example of one document that
had taken more than two weeks to be cleared. "We ask that the Court
impose reasonable deadlines by which time the CIA walled individual must
respond to documents given to him for classification review." She
argued for a 10-day maximum.
The government responded [PDF] saying that it had no way to speed up the process because the CIA
officer in charge of reviewing the material is independent from its
prosecutorial team.
In court on Wednesday, the government even argued
that the CIA was a "victim" in the whole process, facing criticism for
doing its job of protecting national security secrets. Shroff made her
disagreement known.
Prior to the court hearing, Shroff repeatedly
informed the judge that the CIA was hindering her work "because the CIA
insists that all of his written communications with counsel - down to
each comment or proposed edit to any work product - must be reviewed and
cleared in advance by the 'walled' CIA employee."
The walled employee has also failed to sign a Memorandum of Understanding, she complained [PDF], by "insisting on continued edits to standard language." Schoff
argued for restrictions surrounding the search warrants lodged against
her client two years earlier be lifted because they have contained no
confidential information.
In reply, the government argued [PDF] that Schulte and his lawyer had broken an earlier agreement not
to share any information in the case, accusing them of providing
information to the press.
Thanks to the CIA-imposed delays, the judge delayed
the start date of the trial – which was due to begin on April 8 – and
instead ordered a joint conference yesterday, April 10.
After Schoff outlined her frustrations at that
hearing, the New York attorney prosecuting Schulte for the child abuse
images charge suggested that one of his lawyers be used to review
communications instead of the CIA employee, in order to speed things up.
Schoff argued that that process would make it even
easier for the CIA to break client-attorney privilege. "I want to have
an open attorney-client relationship with Mr Schulte just like I do with
everyone else," she pleaded with the judge. "We don't want to have Mr
Schulte's documents read by the CIA at all," she told the hearing
according to a report from Law360.
It's unclear how the judge will ultimately decide –
or whether that decision will even be made public since the entire case
is under a special protective order.
The judge could simply order that the two cases – the
child abuse images case and the CIA leak case – be separated. But then,
of course, that would limit the CIA's ability to make Schulte's life a
misery.