An army veteran has been accused of sharing classified information about an elite commando unit with a journalist.
The FBI arrested Courtney Williams, 40, of Wagram, North Carolina, on Tuesday after she allegedly shared details about a “special military unit” at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where she worked from 2010 to 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release.
“Anyone divulging information they vowed to protect to a reporter for publication is reckless, self-serving and damages our nation’s security,” Reid Davis, the FBI special agent in charge in North Carolina, said in the release.
Federal prosecutors claim that from 2022 to 2025, Williams shared classified information that a journalist used in an article and a book.
Williams, who is charged with violating a provision of the Espionage Act, appeared Wednesday in Raleigh federal court. She was ordered held by the U.S. Marshals Service pending a preliminary hearing April 13.
The name of the reporter and the military unit are not mentioned in the court documents, but the dates and details line up with an article and book by Seth Harp about the Army’s elite Delta Force unit.
Williams was also the subject of a 2025 article published by Politico with the headline: “My Life Became a Living Hell: One Woman’s Career in Delta Force, the Army’s Most Elite Unit.
The Politico article was published around the same time that Harp’s book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, was released. The book profiles Williams and her allegations of harassment and abuse while working at Fort Bragg.
Harp said Williams endured years of “vicious harassment” of sexual nature while working at Fort Bragg. In a statement to WRAL-TV he called her “a brave whistleblower and truth-teller” and said she is being unfairly accused.
“Former Delta Force operators disclose ‘national defense information’ on podcasts and YouTube shows every day, but the government is going after Courtney for the sole reason that she exposed sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the unit,” Harp’s statement continued. “This is a vindictive act of retaliation, plain and simple.”
Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said the topics unveiled in Harp’s book are a bigger national security threat than Williams.
“Ask anybody who has read ‘The Fort Bragg Cartel’ which they think is the real threat to national security: Seth Harp’s sources, or the rampant corruption and criminality they enabled him to document. The administration knows the answer to that question, and that’s why it wants to punish whistleblowers and chill investigative reporting by bringing cases like this one,” Stern said.
Defending Rights & Dissent policy director Chip Gibbons slammed the Espionage Act for enabling “the surveillance of journalists even when they are not the target of a criminal investigation.”
“The flimsy indictment appears to be based mostly on speculation, further suggesting that this is retaliation against a public critic of the U.S. military and an attempt to surveil a critical reporter,” Gibbons said.
However, the Justice Department claims that between 2010 to 2016, Williams worked for the special military unit and received “training as to the proper handling, safeguarding, and storage of classified information.” Around that time, she also signed a nondisclosure agreement, which “confirmed her understanding that the unauthorized disclosure of classified information could constitute a criminal offense,” officials added.
Federal prosecutors say that between 2022 and 2025, Williams had over 10 hours of phone calls and exchanged more than 180 messages with the journalist, who in one message identified themself as a journalist and said they were seeking information for an upcoming article and book.
After speaking with Williams, the journalist later published an article and a book that named Williams as a source and attributed statements to her. Some of these statements contained classified national defense information, prosecutors claim.
On the day the article and book were published, Williams exchanged messages with the journalist, including one where she said she was “concerned about the amount of classified information being disclosed.”
In a separate message to a third party, Williams wrote, “I might actually get arrested…for disclosing classified information.”
Williams apparently noted the Espionage Act in a later message. When the journalist asked her how she knew she could face legal consequences, Williams replied, “I have known my entire career,” adding that “they tell you everyday…100 times a day.”
In another message to a third party, Williams stated that she was “probably going to jail for life.”
The FBI Charlotte Field Office is investigating the case.
