Dead Drop: June 10

REVENGE OF THE NERF NERDS: We’ve provided nuggets for several years about Joshua Schulte. He has made an incredible10 appearances in The Dead Drop, the first, back to 2018.  The former CIA employee has been in jail awaiting trial, and then re-trial, on charges of leaking many terabytes of highly-sensitive Agency hacking tools and information – known at the Vault 7 and Vault 8 leaks. The loss, according to one former CIA official amounted to a “digital Pearl Harbor.” Now The New Yorker is out with a near book-length magazine story about the frat-boy hijinks and name calling that Schulte and ex-colleagues allegedly engaged in at CIA. The story recounts nerf gun battles and rubber band wars that escalated into fisticuffs. At one point, according to The New Yorker, Schulte filed a restraining order in a Virginia court against one of his co-workers, which is not the definition of a happy workplace. The allegation is that Schulte was so annoyed that he decided to leak mountains of the nation’s most secret stuff. The New Yorker story goes on and on – talking about Schulte’s arrest, allegations of contacting Wikileaks from prison – and much more mind-boggling stuff. The story says that Schulte’s own lawyer readily conceded in court that her client was “an a-hole,” but being one is not criminal, she said. He subsequently fired her (but not for that) and is now defending himself against the allegations. His first go around ended in a mistrial and his second is about to begin on June 13.  We hope court security examines everyone entering the court to make sure they’re not carrying concealed nerf guns.

KREMLINOLOGY 201: Back in the old days, one way that amateur Kremlin-watchers would try to gauge who was up and who was down in the Soviet Union, was to assess the seating arrangements at Lenin’s Tomb for May Day parades. Things haven’t changed all that much – and there remains a fascination in trying to figure out who would be in line if anything happened to the current leader. The British tabloid Express got in the guessing game this week with a piece speculating that Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) might be a candidate to succeed Putin if Vlad were to take the fall for the botched invasion of Ukraine.  We are not putting a lot of faith in Express’ opinion however, since they seem shocked that Bortnikov (accompanied by the head of the SVR) met with then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo in Washington in 2018. The event does not sound that shocking to us – perhaps the only surprising part was that the “meet and greet” story got leaked.