Alleged Pentagon leaker revealed to be a 20-year-old who worked at a military base
A newspaper investigation The Washington Post has revealed that the alleged perpetrator of the leak of classified U.S. Intelligence documents is, according to statements by a member of the group in which the documents were shared, a worker at a military base.
According to the newspaper’s source, a minor member of a private group on the Discord messaging service, the alleged perpetrator of the leaks. is a man between 20 and 25 years old who for months sent his fellow chat group members the documents, first reproduced by hand, then by photographs.
The group in which these messages were shared was created during the pandemic on the most popular messaging network for young people and teenagers who love video games. According to the group member, in his chat there were more than 20 peoplethe vast majority of whom were young men and teenagers who shared a right-wing, religious and pro-gun ideology.
Religious right-wing extremist and gun lover.
The alleged perpetrator, the eldest of the group, would have been explaining to the other members the meaning of the military jargon in the documents, and would have boasted that he was revealing things that “the Government does not want them to know.”according to the investigation of the aforementioned newspaper.
The group member has also claimed that he did not send anything by mistake, that he knew for certain what he was doing, and that he knows the real name, as well as the location of the alleged perpetrator of the leaks, although he has expressed that he will wait for the investigation that is currently being carried out by the U.S. Intelligence Services.
The newspaper has had access to videos sent to the group by the alleged author of the leaks – described by some members as an uncle or almost a father figure – in which he is at a shooting range, uttering racist and anti-Semitic insults. before firing at the target.
On one occasion, the source has revealed, the alleged perpetrator even became angry with the other members of the group, as he had spent “an hour every day writing these very long messages in which he often made notes and explanations of things that we normal citizens would not understand,” getting angry at the apparent lack of interest on the part of the youngerthreatening to stop sending leaks.
The main rule that the alleged author of the leaks imposed on his colleagues was not to publish the documents anywhere, as detailed by the source consulted by the newspaper, which adds that in the group there were people from outside the United States, among others Russian and Ukrainian countries.
The leak
According to the aforementioned media, on February 28, the first batch of documents left the group, shared by one of the users -their source does not know who it was-. in another chat on the messaging network they used, and from there to more and more groups, although the Intelligence Services did not report any record of these leaks until a month later.
In mid-March, the alleged leaker stopped posting documents, and a day before the first U.S. media outlet reported the alleged leak, he wrote to the group in a “frantic” state, asserting that “something had happened, and he prayed to god that this did not happen.“.
After the case jumped into the media, the group members jumped to another server to continue their conversations, in which the alleged leaker confessed to feeling “confused and lost about what to do next.”
He finally asked the other members of the group to delete all the documents and all the messages and disappeared, something that according to the source consulted by The Washington PostIt felt like losing a member of the family, we all cried.
He has further stated that he believes that, when the Intelligence Services come up with the alleged leaker – something he takes for granted will happen – he will not get a fair trial and will instead be sent to “Guantanamo or some dark place.”and even added that he might be “assassinated”.
