FBI agents on Thursday arrested a young national guardsman suspected of being behind a major leak of sensitive US government secrets \u2014 including about the Ukraine war.
\nUS Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the arrest made \u201cin connection with an investigation into alleged unauthorised removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information\u201d.
\nAddressing a news briefing, Garland named the suspect as Jack Teixeira \u2014 previously identified by US media as a 21-year-old airman, and the apparent leader of an online chat room where the document trove first emerged.
\nGarland confirmed that Teixe\u00adira is an employee of the United States Air Force National Guard, and said FBI agents took him into custody \u201cwithout incident\u201d.
\nNews helicopter footage showed the suspect, in red shorts with his hands behind his back, being placed by heavily-armed agents into an unmarked sports utility vehicle, in a forested area in North Dighton, in the northeastern state of Massachusetts.
\nTeixeira was due to make an initial appearance at the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
\nUS media began honing in on Teixeira after The Washington Post reported that hundreds of pages of documents had been posted on the social media platform Discord by a man who worked on a US military base.
\nAccording to The New York Times, a \u201ctrail of digital evidence\u201d pointed to Teixeira as the leader of the private chat group on Discord, called Thug Shaker Central, where the documents surfaced.
\nThe embarrassing security breach has revealed US unease over the viability of a coming counteroffensive by Kyiv\u2019s forces against Russian troops as well as concerns about Ukrainian air def\u00ade\u00adnses, and pointed to US spying on allies.
\nPresident Joe Biden addressed the leaks during a visit to Ireland, saying he was \u201cconcerned\u201d but that the intelligence community and Justice Department were \u201cgetting close\u201d to identifying the source of the leak.
\nReports said the alleged leaker, who went by the nickname \u201cOG\u201d, regularly posted documents in the chat group in question for months.
\nThe group of around 24 people, including some from Russia and Ukraine, bonded over their \u201cmutual love of guns, military gear and God,\u201d and formed an \u201cinvitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord,\u201d reported the Post \u2014 which like the Times cited unidentified members of Thug Shaker Central.
\nOG told the group members that he spent \u201csome of his day inside a secure facility that prohibited cellphones and other electronic devices,\u201d the Post report said. He first wrote down the contents of classified documents to share with the group, but later began taking photos, telling other members not to share them, the newspaper reported.
\nOG had a \u201cdark view of the government,\u201d and \u201cspoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark,\u201d the Post said, citing one of the group\u2019s members.
\nA Discord spokesperson said that user safety is a priority, and that content violating its policies can result in people being banned, servers being shut down, and police alerted. \u201cIn regards to the apparent breach of classified material, we are cooperating with law enforcement,\u201d the spokesperson said. \u201cAs this remains an active investigation, we cannot provide further comment at this time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
FBI agents on Thursday arrested a young national guardsman suspected of being behind a major leak of sensitive US government secrets \u2014 including about the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6052,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}