By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON, April 8 (Reuters) - A U.S. Army veteran was charged on Wednesday with providing classified information to a journalist for a book that alleged drug trafficking, murder and corruption at a military base where she had worked, the Department of Justice said.
Courtney Williams, 40, of Wagram, North Carolina, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges related to "her alleged transmission of classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive
it, including a journalist," the Justice Department said in a statement. Prosecutors alleged Williams violated a provision of the U.S. Espionage Act.
The case comes as free-speech advocates have raised concerns about the Trump administration's aggressive posture toward media leaks from government employees upset with U.S. policies and actions.
Williams worked from 2010 to 2016 for a special military unit at the U.S. Army base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and held a "Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance," the Justice Department said.
Prosecutors allege that between 2022 and 2025, Williams repeatedly communicated by phone and text message with a journalist who was seeking information for an article and book about the unit. Williams and the journalist spent more than 10 hours on phone calls and exchanged more than 180 messages, the department said.
While court filings did not identify the reporter, journalist Seth Harp wrote a book published last year titled "The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces" and an accompanying article that named Williams as a source and attributed specific statements to her.
The Justice Department alleged that some of those statements contained "classified national defense information." Prosecutors also said Williams made what they called unauthorized disclosures of national defense information through her social media accounts.
A representative for Williams could not immediately be reached for comment.
Harp said after the indictment that Williams was a "courageous whistleblower who exposed rampant gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the U.S. Army's Delta Force." He also said Williams wanted to be quoted by name in his work and cast the charges against her as "vague and weak."
The Justice Department cited messages from Williams to the journalist from the time of the book's release in which she expressed concerns "about the amount of classified information being disclosed." She also messaged another person the department did not identify expressing fear that she might get arrested for the disclosure, prosecutors said.
Williams signed a classified information non-disclosure agreement when she joined the special military unit in 2010 and again when she left that job, according to the complaint filed against her.
Prior U.S. administrations have on rare occasions also pursued legal cases against sources of leaks to the media that have aimed to expose government wrongdoing, dating as far back as the "Pentagon Papers" from the Vietnam War and as recently as the Iraq war logs in this century.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Lincoln Feast.)
