By Holmes Lybrand and Hannah Rabinowitz | CNN
A former US Army sergeant who allegedly lived in China for several years was arrested Friday on charges of keeping national defense information and attempting to share it with the Chinese government.
According to court filings, Joseph Daniel Schmidt served as a team leader on a Human Intelligence squad during his active-duty service in the US Army from 2015 to 2020. He was responsible for overseeing collection operations, intelligence reporting, analysis, and dissemination. Schmidt held a top-secret security clearance, granting him access to classified intelligence.
Schmidt’s initial appearance in a California federal court is scheduled for Friday, as stated in a news release from the Justice Department.
If convicted, Schmidt could face up to 10 years in prison for each of the two charges he faces: attempting to deliver national defense information and retention of national defense information. No attorney is currently listed for Schmidt on the public docket.
After transitioning to inactive duty in January 2020, Schmidt made trips to Beijing and Turkey and conducted internet searches using phrases such as “turkey extradition military defection,” “soldier defect,” “chinese embassy,” “iranian embassy,” and “can you be extradited for treason.”
In February 2020, Schmidt emailed the Chinese Consulate’s public address in Turkey, expressing his desire to move to China and “share information I learned during my career as an interrogator with the Chinese government,” according to court documents.
In the same month, Schmidt created a document titled “Important Information to Share with Chinese Government,” which the US Army later determined contained classified national defense information.
In March 2020, Schmidt returned to China after briefly visiting the US following his trip to Turkey. According to court documents, he had not returned to the US until his arrest at San Francisco airport on Friday.
During his time in China, Schmidt allegedly created several other documents outlining US Army intelligence practices, including intelligence collection, interrogation methods, and a hand-drawn diagram of an Army computer network.
The former Army sergeant reached out to Chinese government-run companies, offering his services and access to sensitive material. In one email, Schmidt expressed his desire to “reverse engineer” an encryption key used for accessing a classified Army network and provide it to the Chinese government.
In an email to an associate, Schmidt stated that he was motivated to leave the US after uncovering “some terrible things about the American government” while serving in the Army.
This arrest follows a series of incidents this year involving members of the US armed forces retaining or sharing military information with other countries, including China.
In August, two US Navy sailors were charged with sharing sensitive military information with a foreign country. One of them allegedly sent blueprints of a US radar system in Japan. Additionally, a National Guardsman was arrested in April for posting a trove of classified documents on social media.
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