Army Leaker Indicted For Giving Classified Info To Idiot Journalist

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This is going to serve as a cautionary tale for Army members and employees for decades to come. The lesson? Never trust a journalist.

The FBI announced on Wednesday evening that Courtney Williams, an Army veteran who worked at Fort Bragg, had been arrested for leaking classified information. The FBI is taking leaks quite seriously these days.

This was followed immediately by a Department of Justice press release announcing that Williams had been indicted, and listing her alleged crimes.

According to court documents, from 2010 to 2016, Williams worked for a Special Military Unit (SMU) and held a Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance. As a clearance holder, Williams received training as to the proper handling, safeguarding, and storage of classified information. Williams also signed a Classified Nondisclosure Agreement which, in relevant part, confirmed her understanding that the unauthorized disclosure of classified information could constitute a criminal offense. In her role at the SMU, Williams had daily access to a broad range of classified information.

As alleged, between 2022 and 2025, Williams repeatedly communicated with the Journalist via telephone and text messages. 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. 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.

And per what the DOJ uncovered, Williams knew what she was doing was doubleplusungood and could earn her an orange jumpsuit.

On the day the article and book were published, Williams exchanged several messages with the Journalist. In one such message, Williams stated that she was “concerned about the amount of classified information being disclosed.” In a separate message to a third party, Williams added that, “I might actually get arrested . . . for disclosing classified information.” In a subsequent message, Williams citied a statutory provision of the Espionage Act. And when asked how she knew that she may face legal consequences for her disclosures to the Journalist, Williams responded, “I have known my entire career,” adding that “they tell you everyday . . . 100 times a day.” Finally, in a message to a different third party, Williams stated that she was “probably going to jail for life.”

So, how did the FBI know who to investigate? Uh, that would be because the “journalist” in question, Seth Harp (yes, THAT Seth Harp), wrote an entire book allegedly using information that Williams had told him about the Army and the internal operations of Delta Force at Fort Bragg, and IDENTIFIED HER BY NAME in both his book and an excerpt that was turned into an article for POLITICO. That article explains why Harp was interested in the subject, but he then burned his own source by using her real name and a lot of information that should never have been revealed.

Courtney Williams was 24 years old when she learned of an intriguing job opportunity at an unnamed “special mission unit” at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the headquarters of the top secret Joint Special Operations Command. It was 2010, and she was coming off a four-year enlistment in the Army, in which she’d been an interrogator and Arabic linguist but never deployed. She was recruited at a job fair by K2 Solutions, a contractor in Southern Pines, North Carolina run by former members of Delta Force, the Army component of JSOC.

The job opening was in the mission support troop of the intelligence support squadron of Delta Force, a covert commando unit that has been at the bleeding edge of every American war since 2001. Because the job of the MST was to create and maintain fictitious cover identities for Delta Force operators to use on clandestine missions, and because of the widespread perception that most of the troop’s employees were women hired principally for their good looks, everyone in the unit referred to them, informally, as the Cover Girls.

I first learned about the Cover Girls in the course of reporting my new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. My investigation began in December 2020, when two veteran special operations soldiers, including an active-duty member of Delta Force named Billy Lavigne, turned up murdered in the woods on Fort Bragg. I soon learned that there had been many more unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg, dozens of fatal overdoses and a pattern of coverups and collusion between military and civilian police. There was even a shadowy drug ring, made up of paratroopers and Green Berets as well as a local cops and marines from Camp Lejeune, that was trafficking hundreds of kilos of cocaine into the United States from Mexico and allegedly smuggling heroin out of Afghanistan. Underlying it all was a cartoonishly macho culture of drinking, drugs, sex and lawlessness.

We are not told, and Harp does not reveal, how he met Williams and managed to convince her to talk to him. However, Harp considers her a “whistleblower” who is being unjustly prosecuted.

And that “whistleblower” label is being used by other news outlets as well.

Here’s the problem. If you want to be protected by the Whistleblower Protection Act, then you GO TO A LAWYER, NOT A JOURNALIST. Also, it seems to me, while looking at the provisions of the act (note: I am not a lawyer), that Williams would not be covered by the WPA because “uniformed members of the military are in positions outside of the federal civil service defined by Title 5 and are therefore excluded” and her information came directly from her time serving in the Army. Add in that she signed nondisclosure agreements regarding classified information, along with her own comments to Harp, and she knew that once he published her name, she was in deep, deep legal trouble.

On the day the article and book were published, Williams allegedly texted the journalist expressing concern about the scope of the disclosure, writing that she was troubled by “the amount of classified information being disclosed” and that it felt like “an entire TTP was sent out in my name.”

In a separate conversation with her mother, Williams allegedly acknowledged the legal risk more directly.

“I might actually get arrested, and I don’t even get a free copy of the book,” she wrote, adding the legal basis as “for disclosing classified information.”

And Harp might have burned a second source as well. In the POLITICO article, he also names another woman who worked with Williams, Esther Licea. If she is smart, she is getting herself a lawyer RIGHT NOW, because while it’s clear from the article that Williams spilled plenty of tea to Harp (including giving him personal pictures of herself to use in the article!), any defense attorney worth their salt is going to defend Williams by dragging Licea into the case.

So, what did Harp get out of all of this? A book, and credibility enough to go on podcasts.

He makes the money, she goes to prison. And he has the nerve to claim that she was a “whistleblower” and claims that she WANTED her name published for all to see. Harp also claims that the DOJ doesn’t “specify” what material was classified in his piece. Yeah, I’m sure that there will be plenty of specifics when she goes to trial, and the DOJ might want to be deliberately vague about what exactly was classified.

Even if he manages to avoid being indicted, I can’t imagine how Seth Harp thinks he will have a career as a journalist after this. He just allowed his informant to be indicted. What credible source would want to talk to him now? As for Courtney Williams, she knew the consequences of her actions. I don’t think she’s going to find this an even trade. Maybe Harp will chip in to help pay for her legal defense? Seems like the least he could do.

Featured image: gate at Fort Bragg via Fish Cop on Wikimedia Commons, cropped, public domain

The post Army Leaker Indicted For Giving Classified Info To Idiot Journalist appeared first on Victory Girls Blog.



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