A US State Department employee was sentenced to four years in prison in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Thursday for conspiring to collect and transmit national defence secrets to individuals he believed were working for the Chinese government, according to the US Justice Department.
Michael Schena, age 42, sold “sensitive” US government documents to people who claimed to be international consultants, according to court documents, despite clear indications and his belief that they were working for Beijing, receiving at least US$10,000 in return in 2024 and 2025.
“The defendant threw away his career, betrayed his country and abused the trust the United States placed in him by [exploiting] his top-secret security clearance,” John Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement. “He will spend years of his life in prison for passing classified information to individuals he believed to be Chinese government agents.”
It was not immediately clear what was contained in the documents or with whom they were shared.
The US government was apparently never able to definitively prove the documents went to Chinese agents, given that images of them were transmitted over phone lines, instead hanging its case on Schena’s admission that this was who he believed he was dealing with.
Based at the State Department headquarters in Washington, Schena held a secret security clearance, which allowed him to see information up to that level of classification, according to a Justice Department statement.
