A State Department staffer was sentenced on Sept. 4 to four years in prison for selling defense intelligence to individuals believed to be working for the Chinese communist regime.
Michael Schena, 42, was a South Caribbean desk officer in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department’s Washington headquarters and held a top secret security clearance, allowing him access to information that could “cause exceptionally grave damage” to national security, according to court documents.
Between April 2022 and February 2025, Schena sent copies of a variety of documents to handlers he met online, receiving more than $10,000 in return, according to prosecutors.
While two of these people represented themselves as part of international consulting companies, there were clear signs they worked on behalf of Beijing. Believing that these were Chinese state agents, Schena nonetheless continued his relationship with them, according to the Justice Department.
The court filings documented Schena’s engagement with the individuals beginning on April 11, 2022, with one person posing as an international consultancy staffer gauging Schena’s interest in working with them. After Schena responded in the affirmative, the two attempted to schedule video teleconference calls and find a platform through which to pay Schena, according to court documents.
In May 2022, the individual tried to send Schena $100 on five occasions, which an FBI special agent assessed as compensation for information from Schena. The person then made a $500 payment and hours later demanded “pictures” of information with higher resolution, the agent said in a court filing.
About a month after that, on June 19, 2022, Schena emailed the individual text from a State Department document marked as “sensitive but unclassified,” removing some of the markings before sending it off, according to court documents. He received another $500 payment two days later.
Prosecutors said Schena received money from various accounts between May 2022 and March 2023, with at least 10 transactions related to people he engaged online. Five of them, they said, included a note stating, “from Jason.”
Schena took $10,000 from an individual in a Peru hotel in August 2024, according to prosecutors. He also received an iPhone 14, meant as a covert communication device for Schena to receive tasks and transmit information, the FBI agent said.
Prosecutors said that two months after getting the phone, Schena used the device to photograph and pass to his handlers at least four classified documents containing national defense information that were marked at the “secret” level.
According to the court documents, on Feb. 17, Schena downloaded a document marked “sensitive but unclassified” from the State Department system in Alexandria, Virginia, and tried to email it to his personal account. Upon getting an alert that doing so could violate department policy, he designated his email as “unclassified,” according to the FBI agent. Schena deleted the downloaded file before logging off a work-issued computer.
Ten days later, camera surveillance showed Schena logging into the department’s classified enclave to access five documents visibly marked “secret” that relate to U.S. diplomatic relationships, according to the court filings. Using a mobile phone, according to the court filings, he photographed the files from his computer screen, opened an application on his phone, typed in something, and appeared to insert the photos, deleting the photocopies from the phone’s camera just afterward. FBI agents seized the phone and arrested Schena outside his residence in Alexandria, Virginia, before he could send the photos to his handlers.
John A. Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for national security, said Schena’s sentence serves as a warning to those who attempt to “double-cross the American people.”
Erik Siebert, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said the price Schena paid for his “disgraceful betrayal of his country” is “far more than the paltry amount for which he traded his honor.”
“His acts of selfish avarice left that price to be paid by the faithful women and men of our intelligence community and the nation they serve. The cost Schena will pay is the loss of his integrity, his reputation, and, by today’s sentence, his freedom,” Siebert said.
