Former Twitter Employee Convicted of Spying for Saudi Arabia

Mr. Abouammo repeatedly accessed the email accounts and phone numbers of accounts that criticized the Saudi government, including the anonymously run account “mujtahidd,” prosecutors said. He then shared that information with a Saudi official affiliated with that country’s government who, in return, gave him a luxury watch and hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to prosecutors.

“They paid for a mole,” prosecutor Eric Cheng said in closing arguments last week, adding that Mr. Abouammo took bribes close to three times his annual salary for almost a year. “We all know that that kind of money is not for nothing.”

It took the jurors almost three days to come to consensus on the spying count, one of the jurors told lawyers in the courtroom after the verdict was read.

One of Mr. Abouammo’s lawyers declined to comment. Prosecutors didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, and Twitter declined to comment.

Mr. Abouammo is scheduled to be back in court on Wednesday for a hearing.

Mr. Abouammo’s defense said during the trial that he had just been doing his job while at Twitter and that the government didn’t meet the burden of proof regarding allegations that he was involved in a scheme to feed information on critics of the Saudi government to contacts there.

“The government hasn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt” that Mr. Abouammo was an agent of Saudi Arabia, Angela Chuang, a public defender representing Mr. Abouammo, said in closing arguments.

The government said Mr. Abouammo, a dual U.S. and Lebanese citizen, had been recruited into the scheme by a man named Bader Binasaker, who was rising in the ranks of the Saudi government. Mr. Abouammo, a husband and father of three, was charged in 2019 in Seattle where he lived at the time and was working as a social media consultant after three years at Amazon Inc. He pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors said the scheme began in the summer of 2014 when Mr. Abouammo met Mr. Binasaker, an aide to then-Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, during a tour of Twitter’s headquarters. The two began cultivating a relationship shortly thereafter.

About six months later, in December, Mr. Abouammo met Mr. Binasaker in London while on a work trip. He flew back to the U.S. with a luxury watch worth more than $40,000, the government said. A week later, he began accessing the “mujtahidd” Twitter account, which Mr. Binasaker also wanted suspended. The account remains up on Twitter today.

“That luxury watch—it was not free,” Mr. Chung said. “The kingdom had now secured its Twitter insider.”

Over the next year or so, Mr. Abouammo received multiple $100,000 payments into a bank account that had allegedly been set up for his father in Lebanon. He then made two wire transfers of $10,000 to an American bank account, prosecutors said.

Mr. Abouammo never reported the watch or the money payments to Twitter, a violation of the company’s gift policy. Any gifts given to employees worth more than $100 were required to be reported.

Ms. Chuang, one of Mr. Abouammo’s lawyers, said that he should have disclosed the gifts from Mr. Binasaker to Twitter, but that such a misstep wasn’t enough to convict him. It was important to make the distinction between breaking federal law and violating workplace policies, she said.

“We just spent the last two weeks in a glorified HR investigation,” Ms. Chuang said in court.

The government said that Mr. Abouammo also involved one of his colleagues, Ali Alzabarah, who performed website maintenance for Twitter, introducing him to Mr. Binasaker.

The Justice Department charged Mr. Alzabarah and another man, Ahmed Almutairi, with acting as illegal agents of a foreign government for their alleged roles in giving private Twitter user information to Saudi Arabia. Mr. Almutairi, a Saudi citizen, controlled a social-media company that worked for the Saudi royal family and helped recruit Mr. Abouammo into the scheme, the U.S. government said.

Mr. Alzabarah, also a Saudi citizen, used his employee credentials to obtain email addresses, birth dates and other information about users who had made Twitter posts critical of the Saudi royal family, according to the government. It estimated that he had accessed the personal information of more than 6,000 Twitter accounts for the Saudi government in 2015.

When Mr. Alzabarah was later confronted by Twitter about why he was accessing that information, he fled the country, submitting his resignation letter by email on the way to Saudi Arabia, the government said. Mr. Almutairi is also believed to have returned to Saudi Arabia. The FBI has issued arrest warrants for them.

In 2018, FBI agents interviewed Mr. Abouammo at his home. There, he lied to the agents about his involvement with the scheme and gave them a fake invoice he had created just moments before, prosecutors said. He was arrested and charged with 11 counts about a year later.

The trial took place over the course of about two weeks inside the San Francisco federal courthouse and included testimony from current and former Twitter employees, the FBI agents on the case and Mr. Abouammo’s sister. Friends and family wrote in letters that Mr. Abouammo was a loyal and responsible family man and provided support for his sister’s daughter who needed multiple eye surgeries. Mr. Abouammo didn’t testify.

Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at Meghan.Bobrowsky@wsj.com

Mr. Abouammo repeatedly accessed the email accounts and phone numbers of accounts that criticized the Saudi government, including the anonymously run account “mujtahidd,” prosecutors said. He then shared that information with a Saudi official affiliated with that country’s government who, in return, gave him a luxury watch and hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to prosecutors.

“They paid for a mole,” prosecutor Eric Cheng said in closing arguments last week, adding that Mr. Abouammo took bribes close to three times his annual salary for almost a year. “We all know that that kind of money is not for nothing.”

It took the jurors almost three days to come to consensus on the spying count, one of the jurors told lawyers in the courtroom after the verdict was read.

One of Mr. Abouammo’s lawyers declined to comment. Prosecutors didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, and Twitter declined to comment.

Mr. Abouammo is scheduled to be back in court on Wednesday for a hearing.

Mr. Abouammo’s defense said during the trial that he had just been doing his job while at Twitter and that the government didn’t meet the burden of proof regarding allegations that he was involved in a scheme to feed information on critics of the Saudi government to contacts there.

“The government hasn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt” that Mr. Abouammo was an agent of Saudi Arabia, Angela Chuang, a public defender representing Mr. Abouammo, said in closing arguments.

The government said Mr. Abouammo, a dual U.S. and Lebanese citizen, had been recruited into the scheme by a man named Bader Binasaker, who was rising in the ranks of the Saudi government. Mr. Abouammo, a husband and father of three, was charged in 2019 in Seattle where he lived at the time and was working as a social media consultant after three years at Amazon Inc. He pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors said the scheme began in the summer of 2014 when Mr. Abouammo met Mr. Binasaker, an aide to then-Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, during a tour of Twitter’s headquarters. The two began cultivating a relationship shortly thereafter.

About six months later, in December, Mr. Abouammo met Mr. Binasaker in London while on a work trip. He flew back to the U.S. with a luxury watch worth more than $40,000, the government said. A week later, he began accessing the “mujtahidd” Twitter account, which Mr. Binasaker also wanted suspended. The account remains up on Twitter today.

“That luxury watch—it was not free,” Mr. Chung said. “The kingdom had now secured its Twitter insider.”

Over the next year or so, Mr. Abouammo received multiple $100,000 payments into a bank account that had allegedly been set up for his father in Lebanon. He then made two wire transfers of $10,000 to an American bank account, prosecutors said.

Mr. Abouammo never reported the watch or the money payments to Twitter, a violation of the company’s gift policy. Any gifts given to employees worth more than $100 were required to be reported.

Ms. Chuang, one of Mr. Abouammo’s lawyers, said that he should have disclosed the gifts from Mr. Binasaker to Twitter, but that such a misstep wasn’t enough to convict him. It was important to make the distinction between breaking federal law and violating workplace policies, she said.

“We just spent the last two weeks in a glorified HR investigation,” Ms. Chuang said in court.

The government said that Mr. Abouammo also involved one of his colleagues, Ali Alzabarah, who performed website maintenance for Twitter, introducing him to Mr. Binasaker.

The Justice Department charged Mr. Alzabarah and another man, Ahmed Almutairi, with acting as illegal agents of a foreign government for their alleged roles in giving private Twitter user information to Saudi Arabia. Mr. Almutairi, a Saudi citizen, controlled a social-media company that worked for the Saudi royal family and helped recruit Mr. Abouammo into the scheme, the U.S. government said.

Mr. Alzabarah, also a Saudi citizen, used his employee credentials to obtain email addresses, birth dates and other information about users who had made Twitter posts critical of the Saudi royal family, according to the government. It estimated that he had accessed the personal information of more than 6,000 Twitter accounts for the Saudi government in 2015.

When Mr. Alzabarah was later confronted by Twitter about why he was accessing that information, he fled the country, submitting his resignation letter by email on the way to Saudi Arabia, the government said. Mr. Almutairi is also believed to have returned to Saudi Arabia. The FBI has issued arrest warrants for them.

In 2018, FBI agents interviewed Mr. Abouammo at his home. There, he lied to the agents about his involvement with the scheme and gave them a fake invoice he had created just moments before, prosecutors said. He was arrested and charged with 11 counts about a year later.

The trial took place over the course of about two weeks inside the San Francisco federal courthouse and included testimony from current and former Twitter employees, the FBI agents on the case and Mr. Abouammo’s sister. Friends and family wrote in letters that Mr. Abouammo was a loyal and responsible family man and provided support for his sister’s daughter who needed multiple eye surgeries. Mr. Abouammo didn’t testify.

Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at Meghan.Bobrowsky@wsj.com