Ian A. Brinksman, a government contractor, was arrested by the FBI on October 23 after a search of his residence and charged criminally under the Espionage Act, specifically 18 USC 793(d). I won't quote the whole paragraph, but I will note the last sentence of paragraph (f):

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

Now, this is just a charge: he's presumed innocent until convicted in a court of law, yadda yadda yadda. But it's a serious charge.

Allegedly, Brinksman was passing TOP SECRET/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) to someone identified only as "Individual 1" for publication. "Individual 1" is reportedly Brinksman's girlfriend, whom several news reports have identified as Aida Chavez, a journalist who has a Substack and reports on national security stuff. She has previously been associated with The Nation, The Intercept, More Perfect Union, and The Hill.

Once upon a time, I was working in the intelligence community, and I was cleared for TS/SCI and spent some time under non-official cover. Now I can tell you: that's not nearly as exciting as it sounds. I never once had to go around with a knife in my teeth and a Walther PPK in my shoulder holster; all I was doing was sitting at a computer terminal watching radio communications from the bad guys (technically, the Black Hats) and supervising as they were collected and passed back to the CIA.

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The folks that received it in Virginia then collated it, gathered it up, and wrote term papers every few days based on what we at the front end collected.

The information was classified Top Secret because someone had determined that if anyone else knew what we knew, it could be extremely damaging  to U.S. security, and, even worse, they would be able to figure out how we knew, which would let them put a cork in it.

Related: I've written quite a lot on this whole process and about why Hillary Clinton and Edward Snowden should be in jail, to this day. If you want details on the whole issue and on information security, follow up in these articles.

When I was finally cleared, I got extensive training on what I was going to see and the consequences of leaking it. Now, those consequences seemed pretty dire, and the training included warnings about attractive young women who became very interested in what I was doing and whom I was working for. The term of art is a "honeypot" — a term with which Eric Swalwell should have been familiar.

So, it hasn't come to trial yet, and he's presumed innocent (see yadda yadda above), but it looks to me a lot like he either got caught up in a honeypot or, worse, was actually working to reveal things he felt would hurt the Trump administration and, by extension, the United States.

After my own divorce, a cynical friend commented that the question every divorced man has to deal with is whether the screwing you get was worth the screwing you got.

Brinksman should be asking himself that question.