The Justice Department announced Wednesday that the FBI had arrested a former Army employee whom federal prosecutors accused of leaking classified information to a journalist.
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Courtney Williams, 40, of North Carolina, was arrested Tuesday and charged Wednesday with transmitting “classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it, including a journalist.”
Williams held top secret security clearance for her work with the military from 2010 to 2016, the Justice Department said in a news release. Court documents allege that Williams communicated with a journalist from 2022 to 2025, during which they had “over 10 hours of phone calls and exchanged more than 180 messages.”
The journalist, who is not named in court documents, told Williams that they were seeking information about her military unit in connection with an upcoming article and book, court documents say. The criminal complaint says Williams was mentioned by name in both an article and a book by the same journalist published on the same day — Aug. 12, 2025.
Williams was named in a 2025 book by Seth Harp, titled “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces,” published by Viking Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Harp also named her in a Politico Magazine story. Both were published Aug. 12.
The criminal complaint said that on the day the article and the book were published, Williams and the journalist exchanged texts in which Williams said she was “concerned about the amount of classified information being disclosed.”
Harp’s biography on Penguin’s website identifies him as an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone who has written for several publications. He is an Army veteran and a lawyer who was an assistant attorney general of Texas, according to his bio.
According to court documents, Williams is being represented by the federal public defender in the Eastern District of North Carolina, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday night.
Williams wrote that she “might get arrested…for disclosing classified information” in messages with her mother, the complaint says. She then cited a statutory provision of the Espionage Act, according to the complaint.
“I might actually get arrested, and I don’t even get a free copy of the book,” Williams is alleged to have told her mother.
The magazine article in August details Williams’ experience while she was working at Fort Bragg, the headquarters of Joint Special Operations Command, saying she was employed as mission support for the covert unit Delta Force.
The article said Williams described being sexually harassed and belittled by the men in her unit, including its commander. Williams subsequently filed grievances with the Army Special Operations Command inspector general and a discrimination claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which resulted in retaliation and eventually her security clearance’s being stripped, the article said, adding that Williams said she eventually settled with the military.
Harp said in a statement posted to social media Wednesday night that Williams “is a courageous whistleblower who exposed rampant gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the US Army’s Delta Force.”
“Unlike many of my sources, she was adamant that she be quoted by name and made no attempt to conceal her identity because her actions were entirely above-board, legitimate, and admirable,” Harp wrote.
He added that Williams was indicted not to protect classified information “but to retaliate against a women who only sought to improve workplace conditions for female soldiers and civilian employees of the military.”
The Defense Department directed inquiries about the matter to the Army, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday night. Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement published in the August magazine article that “this Department has a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of harassment.”
Viking Press did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday night. Politico declined to provide a comment.
Williams was arrested days after President Donald Trump threatened to jail journalists at a media outlet that reported that an airman was missing after an American fighter jet was shot down in Iran last week.
Trump said he was looking for whoever leaked information about the airman and would pressure the news media to help.
“We think we’ll be able to find it out,” he said. “Because we’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say: ‘National security. Give it up or go to jail.’”
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