A former U.S. soldier’s attempt to pass military secrets to Beijing has ended in a four-year federal prison sentence, capping a shocking China spy plot that highlights growing foreign recruitment threats facing America’s armed forces. Joseph Daniel Schmidt, 31, once held top secret clearance at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state and pleaded guilty in June to attempting to deliver and retain classified defense material, according to the Department of Justice.
U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour handed down the sentence in Seattle on Tuesday, along with three years of supervised release. Prosecutors said Schmidt enlisted in 2015 and served in the Army’s 109th Military Intelligence Battalion until 2020, where he had access to both secret and top secret systems. After leaving the Army, he contacted Chinese consular officials and later traveled to Hong Kong in March 2020, where he continued communicating with Chinese security contacts until his arrest in San Francisco in October 2023.
Acting U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd condemned Schmidt’s actions, saying, “As a retired Army officer, I find it unconscionable for a former soldier to put his colleagues and country at risk by peddling secret information and intelligence access to a hostile foreign power.” Prosecutors detailed how Schmidt created documents based on classified material and even offered Chinese officials a device capable of accessing secure Army networks.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Greenberg said Schmidt “used his training to provide sensitive information to the Chinese security service” and knew “what he was doing was wrong.” The judge weighed Schmidt’s mental health as a mitigating factor, and the DOJ said no classified material reached China. The FBI and Army Counterintelligence Command investigated the case.
