The Rabbit Hole: ‘Open to Work’ for America’s Enemies

Editor’s Note: By any objective measure, it is a time of considerable change within the federal government. National security professionals are not immune to these policy reverberations and, as has always been the case, foreign adversaries are keen to take advantage of any opportunity. In this week’s The Rabbit Hole, reporters Gigi Liman and Peter Beck take us into the world of spies, lies, and betrayal of the country by a rising number of public servants. -Seamus

In March 2022, weeks after Russia failed its invasion’s ultimate goal of toppling the Ukrainian government, the FBI began an audacious campaign to recruit spies in Washington, D.C. According to the Washington Post, the bureau purchased ads on Facebook, Twitter, and Google that were geographically targeted to the Russian Embassy. The ad quoted Russian President Vladimir Putin: “Speak plainly … We’re ready to listen,” in Russian, from a meeting Putin recently held in which he publicly dressed down the leader of the Kremlin’s foreign intelligence service.

More recently, the tables have turned. U.S. intelligence has warned that foreign adversaries, including Russia and China, have instructed their intelligence agencies to target disgruntled federal employees in the United States. Sensing low morale rates among federal employees amid policy turmoil and firings, a foreign intelligence source told CNN that adversaries believe potential American assets “are at their most vulnerable right now.” Among the targets foreign intelligence agencies are pursuing are federal employees with ‘open to work’ banners displayed on their LinkedIn profiles.

“I am curious about how they think this is a good tactic to keep their job,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Fox News’ Jesse Watters in response to CNN’s reporting. Continuing, the departing Intelligence Community chief noted, “And these are exactly the kind of people that we need to root out, get rid of so that the patriots who do work in this area, who are committed to our core mission, can actually focus on that,” she said.

Espionage and betrayal are as old as the country itself, from Benedict Arnold to Edward Snowden. Some are motivated by greed. Others seek a thrill beyond the mundane of bureaucracy. More than a few help foreign adversaries out of sheer stupidity. And there are those who believe that betraying the United States will lead to a better, more just, and moral country—and world. Whatever their reasons, as faith in democracy declines and institutions fray, the United States government will likely have to grapple with more and more officials misusing their security clearances.

“I hope so! I need to get my other BMW back!”

That was the message Army intelligence analyst Korbein Schultz sent to a contact whom he suspected of being associated with the Chinese government after the contact offered additional payments in exchange for classified information. Over roughly two years, Schultz sold sensitive and classified information, including U.S. plans for defending Taiwan and studies on the future development of U.S. military forces to an unnamed, likely China-based conspirator for $42,000. He pleaded guilty in 2024 and was sentenced to eight years in prison. 

Schultz was not the first American to discover that national security secrets can be a lucrative commodity. For far too many who handle the nation’s most sensitive information, the money may be simply too good to ignore. 

Before Jinchao Wei sold any secrets, he confided to a fellow U.S. Navy sailor that he thought he was being asked to commit “quite obviously fucking espionage,” according to court filings. In February 2022, he began communicating on social media with a self-described naval enthusiast who worked for Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, a state-owned Chinese shipbuilding company. Jinchao told the sailor friend about the communication soon after it began, insisting that he was “no idiot” and suspected the naval enthusiast was a Chinese intelligence officer. The friend told him to delete the individual’s contact information and cease communication. 

Wei did not. Instead, he transferred their communication to an encrypted app and sold the foreign officer thousands of pages of sensitive U.S. Navy documents. Wei, who was born in China in 2000 and immigrated to the United States at 16, served as a machinist’s mate aboard the USS Essex. His role on the team responsible for managing the power plant on the amphibious warship gave him access to the more than 60 technical and operating manuals that he was convicted of sharing with the Chinese intelligence officer. 

Wei was not the only sailor working with a Chinese intelligence officer. On August 3, 2023, as federal agents arrested Wei as he attempted to board the Essex, U.S. naval construction electrician Wenheng Zhao was taken into custody 100 miles down the California coast. 

Zhao began communicating with Chinese intelligence in 2021, sending blueprints for a radar system at a U.S. military base in Okinawa, plans for U.S. military exercises in the Pacific, and several other documents, videos, and photos. Zhao pleaded guilty in 2023 and was sentenced to 27 months in prison.

Wei and Zhao were bargain-basement assets for the Chinese government. Some of the most famous cases of espionage have involved the collection of millions of dollars and fine jewelry. For Wei and Zhao, the Chinese government forked over less than $30,000 across both assets. Wei’s return on investment is particularly stark. Federal prosecutors wrote that he transmitted sensitive Navy information before becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen and that he told U.S. immigration officials during the naturalization process that he had never committed or attempted to commit a crime for which he had not been arrested. When the federal jury convicted him of the espionage-related charges in 2025, he was simultaneously acquitted of criminal naturalization fraud. However, the government can still pursue civil denaturalization, which carries a lower burden of proof. 

In some greed-driven espionage cases, U.S. personnel seek out potential buyers. In November 2021, then-First Lieutenant Li Tian at Joint Base Lewis-McChord emailed a contact in China saying he was looking for a “job opportunity.” Over the next three years, prosecutors allege that Tian — along with Sergeant Jian Zhao (also stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord) and former Army soldier Ruyan Duan — created an espionage ring that traded sensitive military information for payment. 

The scheme allegedly went something like this: Tian and Zhao would send sensitive or classified military documents to Duan, who would then connect with Chinese brokers or buyers to sell the materials. The buyer would pay Duan, who would then filter some of the money back to Tian or Zhao. The materials sold through this arrangement allegedly included a report on the Stryker combat vehicle and excerpts of a HIMARS system manual, an advanced rocket system used on the battlefield in Ukraine, among others. 

According to prosecutors, Duan also connected Zhao and Tian to Chinese brokers with whom they went on to deal directly.

In October 2023, a China-based broker, referred to in court documents as Conspirator 3, allegedly introduced himself to Zhao as a friend of Duan’s via the Chinese messaging app WeChat by writing, “Hello i am Duan Xiaoyu’s friend. Boss Duan says you have things to sell. Mind telling what you have.” Through his work with Conspirator 3, Zhao allegedly turned over 20 hard drives in exchange for $10,000, as well as documents on Strategic and Operation Rockets and Missiles (STORM) and military preparation exercises. 

Li Tian’s indictment states that surveillance footage from his unclassified office at Joint Base Lewis-McChord captured him bringing in documents marked “SECRET” on multiple occasions and taking photos with his phone that were sent to Chinese buyers.

These cases are ongoing. 

People who hold security clearances to access classified materials are not infallible or immune to dumb decision-making. The U.S. government expends time, money, and resources teaching clearance holders how to spot agents of adversarial countries. One piece of guidance includes the “honeypot” trope — that significantly more attractive romantic prospects are actually foreign agents, posing in disguise to seduce away information. China went so far as to publish a cartoon and post around Beijing, warning of “dangerous love” from “handsome” foreign spies.

But there are only so many ways counterintelligence can prevent a U.S. Army colonel from writing, “sent to my boss earlier, gives you a peek at what I do for a living,” to a “woman” he knew only through an online dating site. Kevin Luke, a 37-year veteran of the U.S. Army who received a bronze star and oversaw air operations supporting Special Operations Forces in the Middle East during the U.S. campaign to defeat ISIS, was sentenced in February to two years in prison for abusing a position of public trust. The Department of Justice wrote that Luke sent a photograph, following his message, of a computer screen showing a classified email that revealed the targets, date, tactical means, and goal of a future U.S. operation.

Luke’s case is hardly an aberration. In 2024, David Slater, a 65-year-old retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, was indicted for three counts of sharing classified defense information. According to federal court records, Slater was working at the time as a civilian employee assigned to U.S. Strategic Command in Nebraska, which handles the country’s nuclear strategy and defense, including against intercontinental ballistic missiles. In February 2022, he began to receive briefings about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Dear, what is shown on the screens in the special room?? It is very interesting,” prosecutors say a woman who claimed to live in Ukraine asked him. The two had met the same way as Luke and his paramour through an online dating site. In an effort to boast about his job and impress her, the retired lieutenant colonel began sending classified information. On March 15, 2022, just several weeks into the war, the online woman wrote him, “By the way, you were the first to tell me that NATO members are traveling by train and only now (already evening) this was announced on our news.” She called him “my secret informant love!”

Three days later, she asked, “Beloved Dave, do NATO and Biden have a secret plan to help us?” Court records do not indicate how Slater responded, but five days after that, the online woman wrote: “Dave, it's great that you get information about [Specified Country 1] first. I hope you will tell me right away? You are my secret agent. With love.” He was sentenced in October 2025 to 70 months in prison and will be released when he is 70 years old.

Jack Teixeira, a 24-year-old former airman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s intelligence wing, arguably became the most notorious leaker since Edward Snowden in 2023. As with Luke and Slater, Teixeira wanted to impress relative strangers whom he knew only online, albeit for purportedly platonic purposes. Teixeira was an avid player of War Thunder, a multiplayer video game in which players operate various combat vehicles in battles against one another, and was an active member of a Discord group chat made up of fellow enthusiasts of the game, named “Thug Shaker Central.”

Teixeira told the chat members that he was in the Air National Guard. To prove it, he repeatedly shared classified documents that he had accessed at his base with the Discord chat. Another user then reposted the documents to a second Discord group chat centered on the video game Minecraft. Before too long, the classified materials appeared on internet message boards and Telegram, an online messaging app popular in Eastern Europe. 

Western media outlets, beginning with the New York Times, noticed the documents and soon traced them back to Discord. According to federal prosecutors, as news of the leak spread, Teixeira continued actively participating on Discord, writing that although he “was very happy and willing and enthusiastic to have covered this event for the past year and share with all of you something that very few people in fact, get to see ... I’ve decided to stop with the updates.” Teixeira later messaged, “[i]f anyone comes looking, don’t tell them shit” and to “delete all messages,” including the classified documents.

This piece is part of our weekly Sunday Series we call The Rabbit Hole where we choose a single federal court docket, filing, or topic and dive deep into the details. You can read past issues on topics ranging from news deserts to the lack of consistent funding for court-appointed defense attorneys on our site.

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The FBI closed in on him shortly afterward. In November 2024, a judge sentenced Teixeira to 15 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to six counts of transmitting national defense information. 

One of the most recent classified materials prosecutions in which misjudgment allegedly played a role was a case that doesn’t actually involve communicating with another person at all. A special forces operator, who was part of the team that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, was charged with unlawful use of classified material for allegedly using his foreknowledge of the raid to win more than $400,000 bets on the prediction site Polymarket. As with Discord, video games, and online dating, the rise of prediction markets will create new counterintelligence risks, as clearance holders are tempted to take advantage of their special insight into global events while foreign intelligence services look on, likely monitoring prediction markets for indications of the U.S.’s next moves.

Some clearance holders leak intelligence not out of poor judgment but because of a break with reality. One 31-year-old U.S. Army Sergeant, Joseph Schmidt, was charged with attempting to share classified materials with China during what his attorney said was a schizophrenic episode. Schmidt, who had led a human intelligence team for the 109th Military Intelligence Battalion at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, was reportedly trying to warn China about a U.S. government program that implanted a chip into his brain.

In December 2019, according to Schmidt’s federal public defender, he was discharged from the U.S. military with 100% disability after a doctor diagnosed him with schizoaffective disorder. He heard voices that were not there and developed a belief that the FBI was conducting mind control on him through a brain chip that was punishment for crimes he believed he had committed at the age of six.

Six days after being discharged, Schmidt stopped taking his anti-psychotic prescriptions and flew to Beijing, but he was turned back because of COVID-19 restrictions. He returned to the United States after the four-day trip but abruptly left for Turkey two weeks later in February 2020. Schmidt’s attorney wrote that, at some point during this period, his parents tried to intervene to get him to take his medications by taking him to a hospital to be involuntarily committed. The hospital, however, would not place him under an involuntary commitment because he did not pose a danger to himself or others.

In Turkey, according to his plea agreement, Schmidt searched online for how to defect and for the location of the Chinese embassy. In an email he sent to the Chinese consulate in Istanbul, Schmidt wrote:

A week later, he went back to the United States but left shortly afterward to travel to Hong Kong and Beijing again, where he tried to visit the Chinese Ministry of State Security. For some reason, however, he didn’t reach the Ministry. Schmidt then began drafting dossiers on his knowledge of the U.S. Army’s human intelligence programs and emailing various Chinese state organizations. The U.S. government later determined that some of this information ended up in the hands of Chinese intelligence.

In the government’s sentencing memorandum, prosecutors called this “directed and deliberate conduct.” Schmidt’s federal public defender, for the defense’s sentencing memo, wrote that Schmidt had offered up this information to Chinese intelligence in order to gain their trust so they would heed his warning about the U.S. government’s brain chip program.

After working for a brief time as a teacher in Hong Kong, he was lured back into the United States in October 2023 under the guise that he would be interviewed for a job at the FBI’s brain chip program. He was arrested at the airport. In May 2024, a judge ruled that he was not mentally competent enough to understand the proceedings against him or assist in his own defense and ordered that he be sent to a mental health facility under the supervision of the Bureau of Prisons. Less than a year later, in February 2025, the judge found that his competency had been restored enough to stand trial for attempting to share classified materials. 

Schmidt agreed to plead guilty several months later, in June 2025. In their sentencing memos, prosecutors and Schmidt’s defense attorneys disagreed over an appropriate outcome, recommending seven years and time served, respectively. In October 2025, he was sentenced to four years in prison.

A smaller group of people breaks the law by revealing sensitive information because they believe, at some level, that they are doing the right thing.

William Rahman was in many ways a picture-perfect CIA candidate. He was his high school valedictorian, graduated from Yale magna cum laude in only three years, and earned a graduate degree from the University of Chicago. Rahman joined the CIA shortly after and earned competitive assignments throughout his career, including long-term assignments in Iraq — for which he received war zone and joint duty recognition — as well as two assignments in Asia. 

Starting in the spring of 2024, however, Rahman began illegally downloading and transmitting secret and top secret classified documents to unauthorized individuals. According to defense filings, a combination of trauma from his service in Iraq, the war in Gaza, and his wife’s miscarriage led him to develop the “irrational sense that he must take steps to mitigate the potential harm to U.S. interests and somehow help advance the interests of peace.”

The leak that ultimately led to his arrest came that fall. About two weeks after Iran had fired a barrage of missiles at Israel and the region was waiting for Israel’s response, two top secret documents detailing Israeli strike preparations appeared on the pro-Iranian Telegram channel Middle East Spectator. The FBI traced the leak to Rahman’s workstation in Cambodia, and he was arrested in November 2024 on two counts of transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act. 

Rahman began cooperating with the government three days after his arraignment and later pleaded guilty. His actions were driven, according to his lawyer, by “what he perceived to be in our nation’s best interests, not by any desire to do harm but quite the opposite.” In a letter to the judge ahead of his sentencing, he wrote, “It’s hard to see now how I could have seen this then, but when I committed my offenses I thought they would help protect Americans and American interests. Now I face the harsh reality that they did the opposite.” Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles sentenced Rahman to three years in prison.

More recently, in a case that remains ongoing, Defense Intelligence Agency IT specialist Nathan Vilas Laatsch is accused of attempting to transmit national defense information to a foreign government because of his opposition to the Trump administration. 

In an email to an account associated with the foreign government, which The Washington Post reported was Germany, Laatsch allegedly wrote: 

“I do not agree or align with the values of this administration and intend to act to support the values that the United States at one time stood for. To this end, I am willing to share classified information that I have access to, which are completed intelligence products, some unprocessed intelligence, and other assorted classified documentation.”

The people who work in government, particularly in the national security space, tend to be the idealists among us, who believe in a greater cause and want a purpose in their work. But left, right, center, or beyond, we increasingly live in an era of disillusionment with our government and society as a whole. As the country marks its 250th anniversary since its founding, this creeping disillusionment may mark one of the largest tests of our county’s relatively young history. 

As some government employees feel more dejected by the current environment, less confident in America’s longevity, and more cynical about the promise of its founding ideals, these public servants may begin to look elsewhere. Most will look for opportunities in the private sector, but a select few will likely draw the attention of foreign governments seeking those “open to work.”