(CBS NEWS) — A longtime FBI agent has been charged with unlawfully taking and disclosing classified FBI files, according to court records reviewed by CBS News. Johnathan Buma, who specialized in national security and terror cases, has been released on $100,000 bond, with orders to appear in court in Los Angeles.
Buma was arrested as he boarded an international flight at JFK airport in New York, according to charging documents. The Justice Department’s filings allege Buma printed of caches of FBI records from an internal agency network. Nearly 130 files might have been compromised, according to an FBI investigators. The government argue the records were clearly marked as confidential or secure and were copied by Buma in the hours before he left his job in the bureau in October 2023.The charging documents also allege that days after taking copies of the records, Buma used social media to post excerpts of a book he was writing about his career with the bureau. Federal investigators allege the book included information Buma obtained from the FBI about an investigation of a foreign nation’s weapons of mass destruction program.Before he left his job, Buma claimed to be a whistleblower and was publicly critical of the Trump administration during the President Trump’s first term. He had also testified before a Senate committee in 2023 that his informants were the first to alert the government about possible misconduct by Hunter Biden business dealings in Ukraine with an energy company. He said they provided information “concerning Hunter Biden’s escapades in Ukraine with Burisma and how he used his position as the vice president’s son to get a lucrative position.”
