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 government.
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, prosecutors said, Schena sent copies of a variety of documents to handlers he met online, receiving more than $10,000 in return.
While two of these people represented themselves as part of international consulting companies, there were clear signs they worked on behalf of Beijing. Believing 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 to pay Schena, court documents said.
That May, the individual tried to send Schena $100 five times, 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, court documents said. 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: “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 are marked at the “secret” level.
According to the court documents, on Feb. 17, 2025, Schena downloaded a document marked as “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 the department policy, he designated his email as “unclassified,” the FBI agent said. Schena deleted the downloaded file before logging off the work-issued computer.
Ten days later, camera surveillance showed Schena logging into the department’s classified enclave to access five documents visibly marked as “secret” that relate to U.S. diplomatic relationships, according to the court filings. Using a white mobile phone, the filings said, 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 photo copies from the phone’s camera right afterward. FBI agents seized the phone and arrested Schena outside his residence in Alexandria, Virginia, before he could send the photos to the 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.”
“The defendant threw away his career, betrayed his country, and abused the trust the United States placed in him by granting his top-secret security clearance,” he said.
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