Army veteran charged under Espionage Act for sharing classified details

Courtney Williams, a retired Army employee with the elite Delta Force, was indicted on April 8, 2026, by a federal grand jury in Raleigh, North Carolina, for allegedly sharing classified information with a journalist, in violation of the Espionage Act.

The journalist went on to write a book and article alleging sexual harassment and discrimination in the secretive unit, according to news reports and court documents reviewed by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Although the reporter’s name and the specific military unit are not named in the court filings, the dates and other details coincide with the work of investigative journalist Seth Harp about Delta Force.

Williams was arrested April 7 and appeared in federal court in Raleigh on April 13 to face four counts of felony communicating and disclosing national defense information, under Section 793(d) of the Espionage Act. Each count carries a prison term of up to 10 years, along with monetary fines.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Meyers ordered Williams to remain under house arrest with a monitoring device at her home in Wagram, North Carolina, awaiting trial.

According to the criminal complaint, Williams was hired as a defense contractor in 2010 and became an employee of the Department of Defense months later. She then held top-secret security clearance while working for a special military unit at Fort Bragg until 2016.

The complaint alleges that Williams shared tactics, member names and other classified information related to the Army unit with a journalist. Williams spent more than 10 hours on phone calls and exchanged more than 180 text messages with the journalist between 2022 and 2025, the complaint states.

“The tradecraft, tactics, and techniques used by the U.S. military unit in this case are classified and should be shared only with those with proper clearances and a need to know in order to protect American lives and safeguard classified National Defense information,” Reid Davis, the FBI special agent in charge in North Carolina, said in a statement.

Harp’s 2025 book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces,” included Williams’ claims of mistreatment while working for Delta Force at Fort Bragg. Ahead of the book release, Harp also highlighted Williams’ story in a Politico article, “‘My Life Became a Living Hell’: One Woman’s Career in Delta Force, the Army’s Most Elite Unit.”

Williams eventually filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, reaching a settlement and retiring from the Army in 2018, according to Harp’s Politico article.

In an April 8 post on the social platform X, Harp hailed Williams as 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,” he wrote.

Harp himself was threatened with a subpoena in January by a member of Congress for his reporting on the U.S. military operation in Venezuela.

“This is very clearly a retaliatory, anti-transparency prosecution and nothing more,” Seth Stern, chief of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation — of which the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker is a project — said of Williams’ case. “The notion that an administration that casually posts genocide threats during its illegal wars is worried about national security risks from whistleblowers who expose sexual harassment is absurd.”