"Just sprinkle some child porn on him Johnson, and let's get out of here"

That said, it sounds like they caught him fair and square with actual evidence (the backdoor, the access logs, and the versioning of the leak) and the mistrial was the result of a confused jury.

But they were missing the key piece, which is that he leaked it. Without that, it's all circumstantial. Was he probably the one who leaked it? Yeah, I think it's safe to say that. But that's not where the bar lies in a criminal trial.

I believe possession of unauthorized copies of classified information is already a crime, though I think the possible charges are far less than leaking it.

You are correct, which is why they wanted to get him convicted of leaking it.

But, do they need to prove that he leaked it? Surely the backdoor and exfiltrating the data alone would be enough to put him away from a long time, even if he never shared it with anyone.

They need to prove that he leaked it if they want him to be convicted of it. And they want that because the punishment for it is far more severe.

The jury may only be confused because prosecutors never take their duty to bring exculpatory evidence to light seriously because it would harm their conviction rate and they would rather let an innocent person suffer than have their career affected. We should count all trials where innocent people are found not guilty because of evidence introduced by prosecutors as an exceptional win for the prosecutor. Their job shouldn't be focused on convictions but on delivering justice so this would be a case where justice is served even though they don't convict.

He didn’t deny he had the child porn though did he? Hardly seems like a frame up job if he admits it was there, hidden behind 3 encryption layers. I thought his excuse was someone uploaded it to his server “back in college”.

Even ignoring his troubling sexual history and the chat logs, it sounds pretty legitimate.

Then there's that other possibility that he actually did have child porn on his computer.

Sure, that's certainly possible. And if he did, then he deserves to be prosecuted and punished for it.

Well, he's being charged with having child pornography on his computer. Whether or not he was the one who put it there and used it is debatable.

As someone else noted, it seems statistically unlikely that so many people who the government brings national security cases against are pedophiles.

One of the following must be true: a surprising number of all government workers in intelligence are pedophiles, pedophilia and propensity to leak government secrets are highly correlated, or the government is planting evidence.

I'm not going to discount the mental health correlation possibility, because being crazy enough to work for the government and then ineptly leak classified materials... doesn't bode well for an individual's baseline mental stability.