An ex-CIA computer whiz convicted of leaking an arsenal of government hacking tools and possessing a trove of “disgusting” child porn was hit with a 40-year-sentence Thursday after offending a New York judge by comparing his conditions at a New York City lockup to those at Nazi concentration camps.

Joshua Schulte, 35, described a special unit for dangerous inmates at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center as “New York City’s very own Auschwitz” and “something only the SS could come up with” — in references to the notorious Nazi death camp and Adolf Hitler’s army, which murdered six million Jews during World War II.

During a 29-minute speech at his sentencing hearing in Manhattan federal court, Schulte also read a quote aloud from famed South African activist and politician Nelson Mandela about the perils of solitary confinement, and claimed that he was forced to live in a “torture cage.”

But at no point in his half-hour-long address did Schulte take responsibility for the crimes he was convicted of: brazenly leaking government secrets to the website WikiLeaks to settle a petty office score, and storing thousands of sickening videos of child porn on his computer.

“I am blown away by Mr. Schulte’s complete lack of remorse,” said US District Judge Jesse M. Furman before announcing the sentence.

Furman added that comparing the conditions at the Brooklyn lockup — which many defense attorneys and advocates have described as notoriously poor — to those during the Third Reich was taking things too far.

“To compare yourself to victims of Nazis is offensive,” the jurist said.

3

Schulte also to a large extent brought his harsh conditions at the Brooklyn lockup — where he’s been cordoned off from the general jail population — on himself by trying to divulge more secret government information even after he was arrested, the judge added.

Schulte was convicted in July 2022 on a slew of computer hacking and espionage counts for what the U.S. government has called the largest CIA leak in history. A first trial had ended in a hung jury on the most serious charges.

The trove of CIA data published by WikiLeaks in 2017 included information that showed how US intelligence services hack cellphones and other devices to spy on adversaries overseas, prosecutors say.

Judge Furman on Thursday said it would “not be an exaggeration” to call the episode a “digital Pearl Harbor.”

3

Prosecutors had asked him to impose a life sentence, but the judge declined to do so, saying that he’d not seen proof that Schulte’s leak of government secrets — though devastating to national security — directly led to someone being killed.

Schulte represented himself at the 2022 trial, where he called the charges a “political witch hunt from day one.”

Schulte was separately convicted in September 2023 for storing more than 3,000 videos depicting the sexual abuse of young children inside an encrypted cache on his home desktop computer in Virginia, prosecutors say.

“Joshua Schulte betrayed his country by committing some of the most brazen, heinous crimes of espionage in American history,” said U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Damian Williams in a statement Thursday.

“The outstanding investigative work of the FBI and the career prosecutors in this Office unmasked Schulte for the traitor and predator that he is and made sure that he will spend 40 years behind bars – right where he belongs,” Williams added.