Defense

Ex-Army employee with top-secret clearance charged with leaking information to journalist

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by Tara Suter - 04/08/26 7:46 PM ET

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by Tara Suter - 04/08/26 7:46 PM ET

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An ex-Army employee that had top-secret clearance has been charged with leaking classified information, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

In a Wednesday press release, the DOJ said that 40-year-old Courtney Williams of North Carolina was arrested by the FBI on Tuesday. Williams was indicted by a federal grand jury on Wednesday regarding “her alleged transmission of classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it, including a journalist,” according to the DOJ.

“Clearance holders accept a solemn obligation to protect the classified information entrusted to them,” John A. Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement in the release.

“That they do so is critical to the security of our Nation. When clearance holders violate that trust, the National Security Division will act swiftly to hold them accountable.”

The DOJ said that Williams had “a Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance” and was an employee of a special military unit (SMU) for six years starting in 2010, per court documents.

From 2022 to 2025, Williams, who worked at Fort Bragg, allegedly talked to a journalist on multiple occasions on the phone and by text, the DOJ said.

“During this period, Williams and the Journalist had over 10 hours of telephone calls and exchanged more than 180 messages. In one such message, the Journalist identified themselves as a journalist and stated that they sought information about the SMU in support of an upcoming article and book,” the DOJ said in its press release.

“After these communications with Williams, the Journalist published a book and article that named Williams as a source and attributed specific statements to her. Some of these statements contained classified national defense information. In addition to her disclosures to the Journalist, Williams also made unauthorized disclosures of national defense information via her social media accounts.”

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