A press conference takes place at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., Oct. 3, 2023. (Tia Dufour/Department of Homeland Security)
A federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted an Army veteran on charges of disclosing classified defense information to a journalist.
Courtney Williams, 40, of Wagram, N.C., who was arrested by the FBI on Tuesday, held a top-secret security clearance from 2010 to 2016 for a special military unit, according to a Justice Department news release.
Williams was a source for author Seth Harp for his 2025 book “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.”
The Justice Department alleges that between 2022 and 2025, Williams and Harp — who is referred to only as “the Journalist” in the release — had more than 10 hours of telephone calls and exchanged more than 180 messages.
Some statements by Williams that appeared in the book “contained classified national defense information,” the Justice Department said.
In an excerpt from his book that appeared Aug. 12 in the online magazine Politico, Harp detailed Williams’ role working for the unit at Special Operations Command after leaving the Army in 2010. In it, he quotes Williams describing the type of work she performed in a supporting role.
“The things you see on TV and think they don’t exist, they really do exist,” Williams said, according to Harper.
FBI Director Kash Patel said Williams’ arrest should serve as a warning.
“FBI and our partners have arrested a former SOCOM employee, who supported our top-level military warfighters, for allegedly transmitting classified information to a member of the media,” he wrote Thursday on X. “Let this serve as a message to any would-be leakers: we’re working these cases, and we’re making arrests. This FBI will not tolerate those who seek to betray our country and put Americans in harm’s way.”
Williams served in the Army for four years, served as an interrogator and Arabic linguist and never deployed, according to Harp.
She was apparently worried about the information she provided after the book was published and contacted Harp about her apprehension, according to the Justice Department.
In one message to Harp, she wrote she was “concerned about the amount of classified information being disclosed,” according to the release.
The department alleges she worried about possible arrest for disclosing classified information and cited a statutory provision of the Espionage Act.
In another message sent to a third party not named in the news release, Williams said she was “probably going to jail for life.”
In a Wednesday post on X, Harp characterized Williams as a scapegoat.
“The FBI is incapable of solving real crimes, like all the murders on Fort Bragg involving elite soldiers trafficking drugs, so they settle for retaliating against courageous whistleblowers like Courtney Williams, whose only ‘crime’ was telling the truth about Delta Force,” he wrote.
In Politico, Harp wrote that Williams was the target of sexual harassment and job discrimination during her eight years with the unit.
“Once she started speaking up,” Harp quoted Williams’ former coworker Esther Licea as saying, “things kept getting worse and worse for her. They came after her hard.”
Williams settled her claims against the Army’s Special Operations Command in summer 2018, according to Harp’s article.
“Anyone divulging information they vowed to protect to a reporter for publication is reckless, self-serving and damages our nation’s security,” Reid Davis, the FBI special agent in charge in North Carolina, said in the release.
“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,” he said.
