FBI Director Kash Patel shared a chest-thumping social media post announcing the arrest of a U.S. Army veteran who gave hours of on-the-record interviews to a journalist, just days after President Donald Trump vowed revenge against sources who “leak” information to the press.
Following a four-year enlistment, Courtney Williams, 40, spent eight years supporting the elite Delta Force unit at Fort Bragg as a civilian, helping to create and maintain cover identities for special operations troops so they could deploy abroad without being detected.
Between 2022 and 2025, Williams gave extensive interviews to journalist Seth Harp for a book exposing crime and corruption within Delta Force, with an excerpt appearing in Politico Magazine.
According to the criminal complaint against Williams—which doesn’t name Harp—during those interviews, she allegedly provided unspecified classified information and documents in violation of the U.S. Espionage Act, a charge that carries a maximum possible penalty of 10 years in prison.
“Outstanding work by @FBICharlotte and the FBI Counterintelligence & Espionage Division,” Patel wrote on X.com. “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.”
But it doesn’t seem to have taken much digging to crack the case, according to the FBI’s own complaint.
Williams was named repeatedly throughout the book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, and the Politico excerpt features four photographs of her.
“We never made any attempt to hide that or disguise her identity,” Harp told Politico.
Williams told Harp she endured years of bullying and “vicious” sexual harassment as she managed valid but fictitious passports, driver’s licenses, Social Security numbers, front companies, and credit cards to maintain fully backstopped personas for Delta Force.
She eventually filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
“Courtney Williams is a veteran, a mother, and a patriotic American. She has committed no crime,” Harp wrote on X.com. “Trump’s unhinged DOJ will not even say what ‘classified information’ she allegedly leaked. Her arrest and imprisonment is an outrage. FREE COURTNEY WILLIAMS.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the DOJ for comment.
Williams was represented by a public defender on Wednesday at a brief hearing. Her attorney could not immediately be reached for comment.
Her arrest comes as free-speech advocates have sounded the alarm over the Trump administration’s increasingly hostile attitude toward journalists and their sources.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has denied established media outlets access to the Pentagon, and both he and Trump have raged at reporters for asking legitimate questions about Trump’s war with Iran.
On Monday, Trump threatened to jail an unnamed journalist if they didn’t give up the source who revealed that an airman was missing last week after Iran shot down a U.S. fighter jet.
“We think we’ll be able to find it out,” who the source is, Trump said, “because we’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘National security. Give it up or go to jail.’”
The downed pilot evaded capture for more than 24 hours while hiding, injured, in mountainous terrain before being extracted by U.S. forces.
After the officer was downed on Good Friday, Hegseth, a Christian Nationalist, compared the officer’s plight to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
