FBI Director Kash Patel put would-be leakers on notice Wednesday: arrests are coming, and the first one landed that morning.
Courtney Williams, 40, a former Special Operations Command employee at Fort Bragg, was taken into custody on charges of transmitting classified national defense information to a journalist. Patel credited FBI Charlotte and the bureau’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division for the collar.
“Let this serve as a message to any would-be leakers: we’re working these cases, and we’re making arrests,” Patel said. “This FBI will not tolerate those who seek to betray our country and put Americans in harm’s way.”
He then posted on X that more were “coming.”
Williams held top-level security clearance from 2010 to 2016. Prosecutors say that from 2022 to 2025, she ran up more than 10 hours of phone calls and 180 text messages with an investigative journalist, allegedly handing over “tactics, techniques and procedures” tied to a special operations unit. The journalist isn’t named in the indictment, but the details line up with Seth Harp, who wrote “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.” An excerpt ran in POLITICO, centered on Williams’ time in Delta Force.
What makes the case hard to defend: Williams apparently knew exactly what she was doing. Court documents include text messages where she fretted about “the amount of classified information being disclosed.” In another, she wrote that she might “actually get arrested . . . for disclosing classified information.” A third message has her acknowledging she was “probably going to jail for life.”
Those aren’t the words of someone who thought they were just telling a hard truth. Those are the words of someone who knew they were breaking the law and did it anyway.
Harp pushed back hard on X Wednesday, accusing the DOJ of not specifying what information was actually classified and calling the arrest “an outrage.” He told WRAL-TV the government was retaliating against Williams for exposing “sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the unit.”
Williams is set to be represented by the Federal Public Defender’s Office out of the Eastern District of North Carolina.
The arrest fits into a broader DOJ posture under Trump. The administration has spent months warning that leaks to the press, particularly involving military and national security information, will be prosecuted. Trump himself went public with threats of legal action against reporters who shield sources in a separate leak case involving a downed American aircraft.
