No indication accused Pentagon leaker sought to be whistleblower
Mike Brest
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There’s no indication the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking hundreds of classified military documents was doing so to blow the whistle on any specific Pentagon behavior.
Airman 1st Class Jack Douglas Teixeira was charged on Friday with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material, according to court documents. He had been leaking classified information since December, according to the charging affidavit.
SUSPECT FIRST LEAKED TEXT OF CLASSIFIED DOCS AROUND DECEMBER, AFFIDAVIT SAYS
Teixeira was allegedly releasing the information in a chatroom on the Discord platform in a group, Thug Shaker Central, of about 20-30 young men who shared similar interests. He had been transcribing classified documents, though when he began worrying about possibly getting caught, he started printing the documents and photographing them from his home.
Teixeira, whom members of the group called O.G., was the unofficial leader who wanted to teach the others within the group about war, so he began sharing descriptions of classified information, according to the New York Times. He wanted to inform and impress them, members of the group told the outlet. A member of the group said the documents weren’t meant to be shared outside of the group, but they were disseminated by members on other platforms, which is where others began finding them.
“As a matter of law, one can never be a whistleblower eligible for legal protections if the person unlawfully releases national defense information to unauthorized third parties,” Mark Zaid, a lawyer who often represents whistleblowers, told the Washington Examiner. “This is not a grey area. It is completely black and white.”
David Priess, a former CIA intelligence officer, said that leakers do so for any of four reasons, including money, ideology, coercion, or ego.
“The acronym MICE actually helps you remember it. ‘M’ is for money. They’re selling the secrets to get money. ‘I’ is for ideology. They have some kind of anti-government ideology. And that may be the case here. ‘C’ is compromised or coercion. And ‘E’ is ego. The reporting we’ve seen so far really points to the latter of those (ego), that this person appeared to want to impress these men and boys on this private server and was upset when they weren’t as excited about seeing the classified information as he thought,” Priess said on CNN.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the congressional firebrand, appeared to defend Teixeira.
“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and anti-war. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime,” Greene tweeted. “Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”
Others on social media have described Teixeira as a whistleblower because one of the classified documents that was released provided information regarding U.S. and Western troops in Ukraine. This specific document, dated March 23, revealed that the United Kingdom had the largest contingent of troops within Ukraine’s borders at 50, followed by Latvia with 17, France with 15, the United States with 14, and the Netherlands has one, according to the BBC, though this information is not new.
Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder told reporters on Nov. 1, 2022, that the U.S. had “small teams” at the embassy in Kyiv that are conducting inspections of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine. He said they’d be “far away from any type of front-line actions,” though he didn’t say how many troops were in the country.
National Security Council coordinator John Kirby reiterated that sentiment following the leak.
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“I won’t talk to the specifics of numbers and that kind of thing. But to get to your exact question, there is a small U.S. military presence at the embassy in conjunction with the Defense Attache’s office to help us work on accountability of the material that is going in and out of Ukraine. So they’re attached to that embassy and to that the defense attache,” Kirby said, referencing the U.S. military aid sent to Ukraine.
“There has been no change to the president’s mandate that there will not be American troops in Ukraine fighting in this war,” he said.