Washington (CNN) Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee, has been charged with leaking classified information, the Justice Department announced on Monday.

A grand jury indicted Schulte on a series of charges, including illegal gathering of national defense information and illegal transmission of unlawfully possessed national defense information.

According to the indictment, Schulte, 29, obtained classified information in 2016 related to US intelligence-gathering capabilities and then provided that information to an organization that "purports to publicly disseminate classified, sensitive, and confidential information."

The organization is not named in the charging document and is referred to only as "Organization-1." A number of media outlets, including The New York Times and Politico , identified the organization as WikiLeaks on Monday.

A Justice Department prosecutor revealed in a January court session in New York that a former CIA employee had been suspected of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, which posted thousands of pages of CIA documents with secret cyber tools in March 2017.

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