Person responsible for leaking classified Pentagon documents works at military base - WP
The person behind the massive leak of classified US government documents is a young "gun lover" who worked at a military base. He shared top-secret documents with a group of participants on the Discord platform.
That’s according to WP, Ukrinform reports.
It is noted that a group of about 20 people, mostly men, united by an interest in "weapons, military equipment and God" in 2020 formed a closed club on the popular online platform Discord.
"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 WP reads.
The participant carefully read OG's messages, and hundreds more, which he said were sent regularly over several months. He noted that "they were 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,”
OG claimed to have spent at least part of his day in a secure facility where cell phones and other electronic devices that could be used to document classified information stored on government computer networks or printed from printers are prohibited.
OG told the group that he had spent hours working on classified documents to share with friends on a Discord server. Later, instead of wasting time manually copying the documents, he took photos of the documents and uploaded them to the server. It is noted that OG shared several documents a week starting at the end of last year.
According to a member of the group, OG was not hostile to the US government and insisted that he was not working for any country.
Last week, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon is investigating the leak of classified documents on social media concerning US and NATO plans for a planned counteroffensive by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of the President’s Office, said that the publication of the alleged documents on Ukraine's counteroffensive was a Russian bluff.
The US Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the leaked documents.