UPDATE:
The New York Times reports that the charismatic young man allegedly behind the massive leak of secret documents is a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman with the Massachusetts Air National Guard's intelligence wing.
According to interviews and documents obtained by the Times, the suspect's name is Jack Teixeira. Teixeira became the de facto leader of a small online forum named Thug Shaker General. It mainly included young men and teenagers who became friends during quarantine.
As The New York Times explains:
While the gaming friends would not identify the group's leader by name, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The Times leads to Airman Teixeira.
The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of the Thug Shaker Central group through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira's childhood home — posted on social media in family photographs — also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.
The Times also has established, through social media posts and military records, that Airman Teixeira is enlisted in the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Posts on the unit's official Facebook page congratulated Airman Teixeira and colleagues for being promoted to Airman First Class in July 2022.
On Thursday, President Biden said the United States was “getting close” to finding answers about the leak.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
The individual responsible for releasing hundreds of highly classified Pentagon documents has allegedly been identified as a young man and military base employee known on his Discord Forum Channel by the username OG.
According to one of the leaker's friends, he shared the classified documents to impress his friends on the online forum of two dozen people, which he joined out of loneliness during the height of the pandemic.
The group, comprised mostly of young males — including foreigners — bonded over their shared interests.
Another member of the group corroborated the young man's accusations. They agreed to speak to the Post on the condition of anonymity. Both say they know OG's real name and location but declined to provide that information to the paper while the FBI continues its investigation.
The trove of documents disclosed, among other things, how Ukraine's air defenses could crumble in the coming weeks, pessimism in the military's upper echelon that Russia could be defeated anytime soon and ongoing surveillance of our adversaries and allies, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy among them. (RELATED: Leaked Docs Suggest Ukrainian Air Defense At Risk – Pentagon Scrambles To Find Source)
They also included the whereabouts and movements of high-ranking political leaders and elite military units' mobilization and strategic deployment.
Per The Washington Post:
The man behind a massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies, revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine's war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic.
United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read the long note, one of the members explained. But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people.
The young member read OG's message closely, and the hundreds more that he said followed on a regular basis for months. They were, he recalled, what appeared to be near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents that OG indicated he had brought home from his job on a “military base,” which the member declined to identify. OG claimed he spent at least some of his day inside a secure facility that prohibited cellphones and other electronic devices, which could be used to document the secret information housed on government computer networks or spooling out from printers. He annotated some of the hand-typed documents, the member said, translating arcane intel-speak for the uninitiated, such as explaining that “NOFORN” meant the information in the document was so sensitive it must not be shared with foreign nationals.
OG told the group he toiled for hours writing up the classified documents to share with his companions in the Discord server he controlled. The gathering spot had been a pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends. The members swapped memes, offensive jokes and idle chitchat. They watched movies together, joked around and prayed. But OG also lectured them about world affairs and secretive government operations. He wanted to “keep us in the loop,” the member said, and seemed to think that his insider knowledge would offer the others protection from the troubled world around them.
Reflecting on the gravity of the situation, one of OG's followers told the Post, “He's a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren't accidental leaks of any kind.”
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Prosecute then OK
His connection to Biden?
No connection at all, though his defenders will attempt one – “You are holding him to a higher standard than the last two presidents!”
Not unlike the young airman we got rid of for trust issues – “But, sir, you are holding me to a higher standard than the president (Clinton at the time)!”
Trickle-Down Corruption: standard outcome results of the Democratic party.
Immature little boy showing off to his online “friends” – “I know something you don’t know” and “Look what they let me play with at work”.
If proven, he needs to spend a lot of his future making big rocks into little rocks, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he attempts the “Bradley/Chelsea Manning” way out.
The article sys that this guy is “charismatic”!??! How did the writer think that this word fit in? Detracts from the entire article. That aside, I suspect that the perp is going to need more than chrisma to survive behind bars!