
According to him, authorities said they would take care of it, but never did in order to save face after deploying a supposedly broken system that was being used to, among other things, protect the airspace in the Washington, D.C., area, and could have cost thousands of lives. Schweitzer, a California resident, claims he reported the alleged software bug to the DoD hotline, the Army, the FBI, and every single member of Congress to no avail. To that end, Schweitzer told investigators he wanted to bring his supervisors down with him for “illegally” demanding he work on a classified project. The government’s court filings assert that Schweitzer’s motive was simply to get back at Raytheon for shunting him aside. Unable to continue working in his chosen field, Schweitzer, who had hoped to stay at Raytheon until he retired, decided instead to exact revenge on the company by exposing classified information he believed he shouldn’t have had access to in the first place, according to prosecutors. At the time, Schweitzer was at loggerheads with the Pentagon over his use of medical marijuana, which caused him to be stripped of his top secret security clearance. The federal government, however, saw things quite differently. “I was told to ignore the anomaly that I introduced.” “My approach and code were not adequately reviewed,” James Robert Schweitzer told The Daily Beast in his first public comments since his arrest. military secrets claims he did so only because his desperate attempts to correct a potentially deadly software error he accidentally made went completely unheeded by authorities. Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/Photos GettyĪ former Raytheon missile defense engineer who recently pleaded guilty to leaking U.S.
