An Air National Guardsman, Jack Teixeira, 21, has been arrested at his Massachusetts home by federal officials on Thursday.
FBI and local police swarmed Teixeira’s home on Thursday as he is suspected of leaking highly classified U.S. documents on a Discord server.
The New York Times first reported that the leader of an online group where the secret documents were posted is a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.
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According to the Times, Teixeira led Thug Shaker Central, an online group where about 20 to 30 people shared their love of guns, racist memes, and video games.
A top Pentagon spokesman told reporters earlier this week that the disclosures present a “very serious risk to national security,” and the Justice Department opened an investigation to identify the person responsible.
“We’re getting close,” President Joe Biden told reporters in Ireland on Thursday.
The Pentagon said on Sunday it had made a formal ‘referral’ to the Department of Justice (DOJ), asking it to investigate the apparent leak of the documents, which have been circulated on social media sites.
In a statement on Sunday, the Pentagon said it was reviewing the validity of the photographed documents that “appear to contain sensitive and highly classified material.”
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The leaks do not contain exact battle plans, but they present the first known breach of U.S. intelligence since the start of the Ukraine invasion, according to the Pentagon.
The documents were originally leaked onto a Discord server and landed on Twitter and Telegram.
According to the AP, “Since the investigation began, officials have winnowed down the number of suspects who might be responsible, according to a person with knowledge of the probe who was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation. It was not clear how many suspects remained or when or if an arrest might be made.”
The Washington Post has traced the recent Pentagon intelligence leak to a man who shared hundreds of secret files with a small group of young gamers on a private Discord server.
According to WaPo, the man, nicknamed ‘OG’ by the other server members, said ‘OG’ worked on a military base and had access to high-level government secrets withheld from the public, two unnamed group members told the Post.
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Since 2020, OG began sending the classified information to his Discord server, which was once named “Thug Shaker Central,” per the Post.
OG, the server’s administrator, expected the group’s members to pay close attention to the flood of information he fed them, one of the two young Discord users told the Post.
“He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said.
Dozens of the sensitive documents from ‘OG’s’ “Thug Shaker Central” Discord server emerged on Russian Telegram channels and 4Chan forums in late March and early April, when authorities first became aware of the leak.
This is a developing story and will update this as more details are released.
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