US contractor accused of leaking classified defence info to journalist girlfriend

US Department of Justice.

The US Justice Department on Friday accused a government contractor of leaking classified national defence information to his girlfriend, a journalist who publishes a Substack newsletter. According to Reuters, the FBI arrested Ian Brinksman, 42, after searching his home in Washington. He has been charged with unlawfully transmitting national defence information. A federal public defender representing Brinksman declined to comment.

“As alleged, Brinksman reached far outside his own duties to obtain some of our Nation’s most closely held secrets and handed them to a romantic partner he knew intended to publish them,” John Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a Justice Department statement. “That is not carelessness. It is a betrayal of his oath and the American people who entrusted him to fulfil his duties honorably,” Eisenberg added.

Brinksman held a top-secret security clearance while working for a US government agency and later as a systems integration developer for a private contractor working with the same agency, prosecutors said. An FBI agent’s affidavit alleges that Brinksman repeatedly accessed classified intelligence reports and communicated with the journalist. Investigators cited phone records, database access logs, badge-swipe records, emails and other evidence in support of the allegations.

The affidavit identifies the journalist as “Individual 1” but includes excerpts from articles she published. Investigators allege that at least five articles published by the journalist in 2026 contained information closely matching classified reports, some of which carried a top-secret classification. The journalist was identified as Aída Chávez, who runs the Capital & Empire newsletter on Substack.

In a September 28 fundraising post, Chávez wrote that she had published reports based on classified CIA assessments over the previous year, arguing that the public deserved to know about the information. According to a LinkedIn profile bearing Brinksman’s name, he previously worked at Deloitte as a manager and senior strategy security consultant after serving as a US State Department foreign service officer.