U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York on Tuesday granted former Central Intelligence Agency software engineer Joshua Adam Schulte’s motion for a judgment of acquittal on an obstruction of justice charge, though Furman rejected the rest of Schulte’s post-verdict motions from his espionage and hacking trial.
Furman ruled that Schulte’s conviction on the obstruction charge could not be squared with United States v. Aguilar, the 1995 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court found that “merely making false statements to law enforcement agents who might or might not later testify before a grand jury” does not constitute obstruction.
