Federal prosecutors have charged Peter Williams, an Australian national and former general manager of Trenchant, with stealing trade secrets and selling them to an undisclosed buyer in Russia, according to a federal complaint and court filings.
The Department of Justice alleges Williams misappropriated eight trade secrets from two unnamed companies between April 2022 and August 2025 and that he earned about $1.3 million from the sales. Prosecutors are seeking forfeiture of his residence, luxury watches, jewelry and funds held in seven bank and cryptocurrency accounts, saying those assets were derived from the criminal activity.
The filings do not specify the nature of the stolen trade secrets or identify the Russian buyer; they allege Williams systematically transferred confidential proprietary data over a period spanning more than three years. The complaint does not accuse Trenchant or its parent, L3Harris, of wrongdoing.
Trenchant, formed in 2018 following L3Harris’s acquisition of Azimuth Security and Linchpin Labs, is a specialized cybersecurity division that provides hacking and surveillance tools to Western intelligence agencies and caters to governments in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance. The technologies, based on undisclosed vulnerabilities, are described as valuable assets with national security implications and are tightly held.
The allegations come after an internal Trenchant investigation earlier this year reportedly prompted by a leak of hacking tools; multiple former employees interviewed by TechCrunch said one former exploit developer was wrongly accused by company officials of leaking tools that targeted products such as Google Chrome.
Whether the Justice Department action is directly tied to that internal investigation remains unclear, and court filings do not explicitly connect the sale of secrets to the leak or detail overlaps between the events. L3Harris, headquartered in Melbourne, Fla., declined to comment, and Williams’ attorney did not reply to requests for comment. An arraignment and possible plea agreement are scheduled for Oct. 29 in Washington, D.C.