[runnerup]

Most likely OP cannot afford the team of comprehensive legal advisors which would be necessary to achieve a truly fair outcome. I imagine OP has been dealing with this situation mostly silently for approximately a year by now. The "wheels of justice" turn slowly but generally inexorably. Once the FBI decides to bring charges, they almost always have already completely made up their mind and get exactly the outcome they want.

OP's life has been and will continue to be thoroughly destroyed by the consequences of their poor judgement and there's likely no actions OP can take at this point to change the medium-term outcomes. Barring winning the lottery (in some form or another), OP would not be able to pay this debt if they lived to be 1,000 years old. And it's not dischargeable in bankruptcy. That's ignoring any potential jail time and consequences on OP's future employment options.

So, quite frankly, at this point OP is probably posting here in a state of pseudo-panic, because there's very little chance this post would make it worse now that he's already been criminally charged -- again, 99+% of the time, the main outcomes are usually decided at the time of charging, not sentencing.

Long-term, OP may be able to eventually build a life that they are happy with. But they will have many, many doors closed to them.

On an absolute scale, it's possible that OP's actions directly caused a response that wasted many, many man-years of labor even if the data leaked wasn't itself important (technical and legal investigation, management conversations/energy/time that could have been spent on other things, security containment and mitigation, FBI investigators times, the courts time). Its probably not possible for OP to "pay back" the time and energy to all those people that they've affected.

But on a relative scale, its likely that no individual or corporation was threatened with existential harm over this, while OP certainly is facing what feels like existential consequences. So that will be very very hard for them to deal with right now.

[rosndo]

If OP wants advice beyond “get a better lawyer”, it would be useful to know what they actually did or are accused of doing.

As it stands his post doesn’t really provide any useful details beyond “I’m facing federal charges and am not happy with my lawyer”.