By Kerry Picket The Washington Times Thursday, March 20, 2025
An FBI agent and whistleblower who criticized the agency going back to President Trump’s first term was arrested this week at New York’s JFK International Airport and charged with illegally disclosing classified documents.
Jonathan Buma, who worked in counterintelligence, was taken into custody Monday just before he boarded an international flight.
According to court documents, Mr. Buma was charged with printing confidential material from the FBI and distributing it to his associates in 2023 for a book he was planning to write about his life in the bureau and as a whistleblower.
He was released on $100,000 bail during a preliminary hearing in Brooklyn federal court, and the charges were filed in the Central District of California.
“The book draft contained information that Buma obtained through his position as an FBI Special Agent that relates to the FBI’s efforts and investigations into a foreign country’s weapons of mass destruction program,” part of the affidavit filed Tuesday says.
Mr. Buma is a 15-year FBI veteran who worked out of the Los Angeles field office and allegedly printed about 130 files from the bureau’s internal network, including some marked “Protected.”
Authorities say he put in for leave at the agency in October 2023 after he secured the documents.
Prior to obtaining the files, he was a critic of the FBI through a whistleblower complaint in January 2022, saying that “numerous acts of intelligence suppression” of his reporting was tied to foreign intelligence.
In September 2023, he told Business Insider that when he informed his supervisor in 2019 at his field office about potential crimes related to Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, his boss was “very interested” and was “adamant about packaging that information up and transferring” it to the appropriate case agent.
He lamented, though, that when he tried to tell his boss that President Trump’s attorney Rudolph Giuliani might have been compromised by a Russian influence operation, his supervisor shut him down.
One month after Mr. Buma’s 2023 interview with Business Insider, his home was raided by the FBI over suspicion that he mishandled classified information.
Scott Horton, a lawyer representing Mr. Buma following the raid, reported at the time that no classified information was found and denied any wrongdoing by his client.
