FBI arrests Pentagon leak suspect

UPDATED AT 1:42 CENTRAL: The FBI arrested a man believed to be responsible for leaking hundreds of highly classified materials on the social media platform Discord. According to the New York Times, on Thursday April 13th, half a dozen FBI agents arrested 21-yeard-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira.

The NYT times was the first news outlet to report Teixeira was connected to the Discord leak. Earlier in the day, the Associated Press reported the FBI was looking to question Teixeira.

SAN’s original article appears below:

The U.S. government may know who is behind the Discord leaks. A Massachusetts National Guard member is now believed to be the person responsible for leaking hundreds of highly classified documents on the Discord social media platform.

Breaking News: The leader of an online group at the core of a huge leak of secret U.S. documents is an Air National Guardsman, interviews and papers show. https://t.co/sZV54rzzhw pic.twitter.com/joQlg034uI

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 13, 2023

Quoting government officials and interviews, the New York Times reported 21-year-old Jack Teixeira is the source of the leak. Teixeira is a member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts National Guard, and was stationed at Fort Bragg during the time of the leaks.

The Washington Post spoke to one of the 25 or so members allowed in that online chatroom. The member said the leader of the group and person responsible for leaking the documents was a man in his 20s who worked on a military base and went by the name “OG.”

The chat room member said he hadn’t spoken to investigators yet about the matter, and apparently he didn’t need to.

“They can narrow down [a suspect pool] from two different directions that I can see,” Jack Rice, a criminal defense attorney and former CIA case officer, said.. “Who has access to this information? And then who had access to this chat room? And let’s see where those two crossed one another. And my guess is those numbers will be very small indeed.”

Straight Arrow News spoke to Rice hours before news broke Teixeira may be behind the leaks. Rice said at the time he wouldn’t be surprised if the government already knew who was responsible for the leaks.

“Sometimes in the classified world, in the intelligence world, one of the things that is true is there are some pieces of evidence, some pieces of intelligence, that can only come from one or two or three different sources,” Rice explained. “So, you can potentially reverse engineer a piece of classified information, and literally walk it back to where it came from.”

On April 13, two government officials with knowledge of the investigation said the FBI wanted to speak with Teixeira after narrowing down its suspect list. The New York Times said a person at Teixeira’s house told a reporter they expected federal investigators to be “around soon.”

Rice said punishing the person responsible won’t be the end of the matter for the U.S government. As Rice explained, even though the source of the leak appears to be an American, the original intelligence could have come from another country.

“What happens if [the disclosed intelligence] came from a partner? What happens if this came from the Israelis, or this came from the Germans, or the French, or the Brits, or somebody else?” Rice said. “Now all of a sudden, it’s not just us, it’s also partnerships. And the potential for what that can mean sort of creates a blowback as well.”