The former CIA staffer accused of passing top secret documents to WikiLeaks was a vocal critic of fellow CIA leaker Edward Snowden — and thought he should be executed, a onetime colleague testified Friday.
“He believed Snowden should be executed,” CIA developer Jeremy Weber told jurors as he recalled Joshua Schulte’s vocal disgust of the ex-CIA staffer and National Security Agency contractor’s leak of highly classified documents.
“He seemed to have the feeling that [Snowden] betrayed his country,” said Weber, who is testifying under a false name to protect his identity. “He might have called him a traitor.”
Weber testified that he couldn’t remember exactly when those conversations took place, but that they were before the now-31-year-old allegedly snapped after losing certain work privileges because of a beef with another colleague.
Prosecutors claim Schulte — feeling slighted at work — hacked into servers to steal the information that would later comprise the massive WikiLeaks dumps dubbed “Vault 7” and “Vault 8,” which began appearing on Twitter March 7, 2017.
Schulte maintains his innocence.
Snowden currently is living in Russia, where he’s been granted permanent residency following a request for asylum.