A former Raytheon missile defense engineer who recently pleaded guilty to leaking U.S. military secrets claims he did so only because his desperate attempts to correct a potentially deadly software error he accidentally made went completely unheeded by authorities.
“My approach and code were not adequately reviewed,” James Robert Schweitzer told The Daily Beast in his first public comments since his arrest. “I was told to ignore the anomaly that I introduced.”
The federal government, however, saw things quite differently. At the time, Schweitzer was at loggerheads with the Pentagon over his use of medical marijuana, which caused him to be stripped of his secret-level security clearance. Unable to continue working in his chosen field, Schweitzer, who had hoped to stay at Raytheon until he retired, decided instead to exact revenge on the company by exposing classified information he believed he shouldn’t have had access to in the first place, according to prosecutors. The government’s court filings assert that Schweitzer’s motive was simply to get back at Raytheon for shunting him aside. To that end, Schweitzer told investigators he wanted to bring his supervisors down with him for “illegally” demanding he work on a classified project.
Today, Schweitzer, who says he sees himself not as a traitor but a whistleblower, is still reeling from being hauled in by the feds last year, describing the nightmarish experience as “a comedy of errors, as far as I’m concerned—a dark comedy of errors.”
As The Daily Beast exclusively reported at the time, Schweitzer, 58, was arrested and charged in December 2020 with malicious mischief and destruction of government property for sharing “national defense information” regarding U.S. missile sensors. Prosecutors said Schweitzer knew some of what he exposed “could result in American casualties abroad or in the United States,” which Schweitzer freely admits, insisting that’s why he was so eager to sound the alarm.
Schweitzer, a California resident, claims he reported the alleged software bug to the DoD hotline, the Army, the FBI, and every single member of Congress to no avail. According to him, authorities said they would take care of it, but never did in order to save face after deploying a supposedly broken system that was being used to, among other things, protect the airspace in the Washington, D.C., area, and could have cost thousands of lives. Court filings by investigators and prosecutors, who would not comment on the case, do not mention anything about this supposed anomaly.
Schweitzer, a deeply religious man who says he is on the milder end of the autism spectrum and very nearly became a Catholic priest, told investigators that he had “followed the process Edward Snowden was supposed to follow.” But, he said, it did “not work as advertised.”
In response to a detailed list of questions about Schweitzer’s claims The Daily Beast submitted to the FBI, a bureau spokesperson said, “Per DOJ policy, we neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation and do not have a comment for you.”
The majority of Schweitzer’s troubles can be traced back to 2014. While working at a Raytheon facility in Fullerton, California, Schweitzer developed classified radar signal processing software for use by the U.S. Army. But after he lost his clearance that August, Schweitzer claims he was kept on the classified project at the Army’s request. In a sprint to the finish in late 2015, Schweitzer said he was up late one night trying to address an “algorithmic instability” in the radar software. Aware of the impending deadline, along with instructions to deliver results, Schweitzer said he got a little sloppy and inadvertently introduced a vulnerability into the system.
According to Schweitzer, no one saw the bug as a big deal, and working on a fix got put on the backburner. In the meantime, Schweitzer said he was presented with a challenge coin for writing the supposedly faulty software. (Although the software vulnerability Schweitzer claims to have accidentally baked into the radar system was not discussed openly in court, Schweitzer made mention of it in posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other online sites. While being questioned by investigators in 2019, Schweitzer said he had been told by authorities that his code was “in place and working,” according to one DoD report.)
“I did not have a security clearance when I developed the classified code,” Schweitzer told The Daily Beast. “Raytheon management directed me to break the law, the Army was aware of Raytheon’s actions and looked the other way.”
The government claims Schweitzer “was indeed working close to but not in the classified realm,” according to internal DoD reports Schweitzer later obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, adding that Schweitzer was “removed from the project” once there was no further unclassified work to be done.
In June 2016, Schweitzer pulled off the first of what he calls his “stunts.” He submitted a complaint to the DoD Inspector General accusing Raytheon of committing security violations—namely, more than a dozen higher-ups he claimed had him work on a classified project without a proper clearance. Schweitzer’s complaint, according to court filings, “contained national defense information classified at the SECRET level.”
Schweitzer resigned from Raytheon the following month.
“Because of my horrible late night design decision, a key component of our nation’s homeland defenses could allow missiles/planes/drones to approach undetected,” Schweitzer told The Daily Beast. “I decided to get loud. I believe I was supposed to get loud.”
Schweitzer continued bombarding DoD over the next year-and-a-half with reports accusing Raytheon of violating protocols for handling classified information referring to his own work on classified systems without holding a clearance. He inundated the Inspector General with submissions, accusing Raytheon of wasteful spending, and pointed out that his own marijuana use had been a violation of the government’s drug-free workplace policy. Many of the complaints purposely included classified attachments. Schweitzer says the FBI told him he “overwhelmed” the IG with his activity, a situation suggested in court records.
The precise issue with the software remains classified, according to Schweitzer, who claims he is prohibited from sharing any details. Authorities have never confirmed or denied Schweitzer’s allegation about the bug. But at a September 2021 court hearing, Schweitzer told the judge, “If you understood the vulnerability, you would understand why I could not remain silent.”
Schweitzer told The Daily Beast that he often “abstracted the vulnerability” by referring to it as a “problem,” which he left undefined in his public releases, such as an article containing classified information he later posted to LinkedIn. He said the term “vulnerability” appears multiple times in discovery documents he was given access to by prosecutors, but isn’t allowed to share them. Today, Schweitzer describes his crimes as an act of protest. The feds saw them as, simply, crimes being committed by a disgruntled former employee bent on retribution.
Schweitzer became a medical marijuana patient in 2009. In 2010, he told Raytheon’s Fullerton Facility Security Officer, or FSO, that he planned on using medical marijuana for his struggles with insomnia, with a doctor’s prescription.
Schweitzer, who said he was barely getting by on about three hours of sleep each night, lived in California, where medical marijuana was legalized in 1996. He had tried Ambien and Sonata, which didn’t keep him asleep. Lunesta put him to sleep, but gave him “the most disgusting dreams I’ve ever had.” Schweitzer said he received verbal and written permission from the FSO, who informed him that he “only had to abide by state regulations.”
Only, this wasn’t quite true. Marijuana, even when prescribed by a physician, remains illegal under federal law. And since security clearances are issued by the federal government, federal rules apply. In 2014, Schweitzer was up for his standard 10-year security clearance review, and said it was then that he “self-identified” as a medical marijuana patient.
“When [the FSO] learned the real regulations, she indicated that DoD changed their position on medical marijuana,” Schweitzer told The Daily Beast.
The FSO’s “erroneous advice” is cited in the DOJ’s original complaint against Schweitzer, which says the mistake “mitigated past use” by Schweitzer. But DoD told Schweitzer he couldn’t use medical pot from then on. Schweitzer refused—and was stripped of his clearance in August.
The FSO, who is unnamed in the complaint, was unable to be reached for comment.
Raytheon brought in another engineer, who held a top secret clearance, to take over the classified portions of the missile defense software that Schweitzer was no longer supposed to be touching.
But Schweitzer’s bosses still had him working on sensitive aspects of the program, he told Army investigators in a series of recorded phone calls reviewed by The Daily Beast.
“They wanted their code, they wanted my skills on it, and this is how they could do it,” Schweitzer, who was earning more than $170,000 a year at Raytheon, said in one of the calls. “And once I figured out what was going on, that I was never going to get my clearance and I was being used...that was a big ‘Oh shit’ moment.”
In November 20