>Maybe the issue here is that the case isn't that strong after all.

It doesn't need to be. It just needs to be someone. Imagine you're the head of a department and everyone up to the president is breathing down your neck about how this data made it out of your supposedly air-gapped system. Do you simply blame it on the Russians or Chinese, essentially admitting that a foreign intelligence service was able to walk past your security with all that confidential data? Or do you pick the weakest link among your own? Someone who will soothe superiors, can't really stand up for himself and will absorb all the blame?

The New Yorker story suggests there was some digital evidence, not of upload to wikileaks but of unauthorised access and download:

And, on the sixth day of the trial, prosecutors laid out what they regarded as a coup de grâce—the digital equivalent of fingerprints at a crime scene. Even after Schulte was stripped of his administrative privileges, he had secretly retained the ability to access the O.S.B. network through a back door, by using a special key that he had set up. The password was KingJosh3000. The government contended that on April 20, 2016, Schulte had used his key to enter the system. The files were backed up every day, and while he was logged on Schulte accessed one particular backup—not from that day but from six weeks earlier, on March 3rd. The O.S.B. files released by WikiLeaks were identical to the backup from March 3, 2016. As Denton told the jurors, it was the “exact backup, the exact secrets, put out by WikiLeaks.”

>"But US prosecutors never presented any forensic evidence to specifically tie Schulte to the publication of the CIA hacking materials on WikiLeaks."

I mean, getting into forensic evidence of what he did at the CIA would likely require exposing top secret classified material in a court room. Suffice to say, prosecutors generally can't do this except as a last resort.

When the guy left his phone full of passwords, and his computer full of encrypted child sex assault material, I'm not so sure the prosecutor feels the need to burn CIA secrets in court anymore.

> I find interesting that 'they' feel the need to do a character assination on the man

That's par for the course for the mainstream US (and Western, more generally, I would say) media nowadays. It wasn't always like that, but the last few years and especially the current war against Russia have accelerated this trend.

I don’t know about how strong the case is, but the stories about his character makes sense in the context of someone who would leak that.

Notice who you call as ‘they’ didn’t portray him as a self-proclaimed idealist, but someone with an unstable personality and who weaponizes workplace bureaucracy for petty fights

We do know for a fact that he filed for a restraining order against his coworker, that seems extremely weird to me, and I don’t work for the CIA.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

Character assassination? He assassinated his own character. Character suicide.

He ran a child porn server:

> At one point, he volunteered to grant his new friends access to the child-porn archive on his server.

Sexually assaulted a passed-out roommate:

> When F.B.I. investigators searched Schulte’s phone, they found something especially alarming: a photograph that looked as though it had been taken inside the house in Sterling, Virginia, where he had lived while working for the C.I.A. The photograph was of a woman who looked like she was passed out on the bathroom floor. Her underwear appeared to have been removed and the hand of an unseen person was touching her genitals. State investigators in Loudoun County subsequently identified the woman and interviewed her. She has not been publicly named, but she told them that she had been Schulte’s roommate and had passed out one night, with no memory of what had happened. The encounter in the photograph was not consensual, she assured them.

You've avoided saying it directly, but the oblique claim in your post is that (1) the CIA is the New Yorker's source for the claims in the article, and (2) the New Yorker acceeded to an intentional character assassination.

These are extraordinary claims, ones that you haven't presented correspondingly extraordinary evidence for.

He still claims innocence, so I doubt he thinks he deserves the same punishment.

My favorite part was how insanely petty the whole thing sounded... How he insisted his nickname should be "Badass" but people called him what you mentioned as well as "Voldemort" more often than his self appointed nickname... What a goof. If this article is accurate it paints a picture of an incredibly socially immature workplace where people who didn't advance past the point of high school in that aspect left the guy feeling bullied enough that he did the leak. This was something like my first and only experience doing government contracting at a large corporation, on my tour of the offices one of the things I pointed out to my boss were these print out clip art stop signs that said "STOP BULLYING" on the walls everywhere and that I hadn't seen something like that since high school. He rolled his eyes pretty hard at that one but these people were responsible for systems that enormous amounts of people's lives depended on. I remember when these systems failed multiple times over multiple incidences and just thought of the stop sign shit.