The details of
it are both incredible that it happened,
but also it seems to reveal
how easy it is
for things like this to happen.
Tens of thousands of people
are just like this.
21 year old.
What are U.S.
national security officials
concerned about right now?
Well, they're concerned about the fact
that it appears
to have been so easy for this 21
year old Air National Guard member
to not only access
these systems
and view intelligence that he did not
necessarily need for his day to day job.
But also to apparently print them
and take them out of the building
without anyone noticing.
So that with regard to the procedure,
that is pretty concerning.
And then,
of course, they're concerned
about the actual content
of what leaked here.
It's top secret information
having to do with our allies,
including South Korea, Israel
and even Ukraine.
These documents
reveal that the US was spying
on Ukrainian
President Vladimir Zelinsky,
as well as Israeli officials
in South Korean officials.
And they also reveal
really important things
about what the U.S.
knows about Russian defense
ministry officials.
And things
that could lead to access being cut off
for the United States.
So some of these documents
very clearly say that they were sourced
to human intelligence, human sources.
That is extremely dangerous
because these human sources
could now be hunted down.
U.S.
officials say the eavesdropping points
that the U.S.
has on the Russians, for example,
they might now be cut off.
So all of this deeply concerning.
And we still don't know
for sure just how this young airman
was able to get this information out.
And why as part of his job
as a young basically I.T.
person for the Air National Guard.
Was he looking at these documents
and why did he have access to them?
Yeah, I mean,
in some ways,
I'm not entirely surprised
that he had access to them,
but that someone could just print it
and walk away
and nobody really notices for months.
That seems to me
to be just an embarrassing hole.
Gaping hole in the US
control over national security documents.
And one of the other subplots of
this is the way
in which
these revelations
that you were just talking about,
about the Ukraine war
is basically just feeding into this
anti Ukraine
sentiment in American politics.
Listen to Tucker Carlson on Fox,
basically defending this leaker
accused of leaking national
security secrets.
The only man
who has been taken into custody or likely
ever will
be is a 21 year old
Massachusetts Air National Guardsman
who leaked the slides
that showed that Lloyd Austin was lying.
He revealed the crimes.
Therefore, he's the criminal.
That's how Washington works.
Telling the truth is the only real sin.
I mean, I think a lot of Republicans
would like that to be a fringe view.
But it is speaking
to a part of the Republican Party
right now
that sees these leaks as
a public service in some way.
Well, it's
playing into the grievance politics
that we've seen
for the past six years in this country.
And I think
this is the other subplot here,
because this allowed us a window
into some of the spaces
that particularly
young white
men in this country are inhabiting.
And it wasn't just anti Ukraine.
It was anti-black, anti-trans, anti-gay,
very pro-gun.
If you look at a lot of the paraphernalia
that this young man was collecting.
But this is just
another exclamation point
on the point that a lot of the politics
right now in Congress, for instance, is
basically people who are very bombastic,
who are about us
versus them and grievance politics,
and that this is actually having
a real impact on our culture
and on young people.
Here's the Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet
and then you can jump in.
She tweeted this week,
Jack Toccara is
white, white,
male, Christian and anti-war.
And that makes him an enemy
to the Biden administration.
She goes on and on, criticizing
the war
in Ukraine,
criticizing, basically criticizing Naito
and getting slammed this morning
by Lindsey Graham on this week
What they're suggesting
will destroy
America's ability to defend itself.
There is no justification for this
and for any member of Congress
to suggest it's
okay to leak classified information
because you agree with
the cause
is terribly irresponsible
and puts America in serious danger.
Yeah.
So what
Marjorie Taylor Greene said,
I agree with what Heidi.
I mean, she invoked in her tweet,
he was white.
He was young. He was male.
Same things that Tucker Carlson said.
And I do think that some Republicans,
like you mentioned,
are trying to take that as a fringe view,
as one way to criticize
the Biden administration.
Over this massive leak.
They want to put
the onus of what happened
on the Biden administration
and to criticize them over this.
But I do think that the majority
of members that I've spoken
with, Republicans on Capitol
Hill, take Lindsey Graham's view,
which is that
this is a very dangerous thing
that has happened
and we cannot be defending the leaker.
And I think that's going to continue
to be the message from those Republicans.
We know that they've been really eager
to get way more information on this.
They felt very out of the loop
on what's been happening
with this investigation.
And all senators will have a briefing
on this leak on Wednesday.
And I
do think that once that happens
and once they gain more information,
I think the Marjorie Taylor
Greens of the world and Tucker
Carlson taking this view is very much
a very small view on Capitol.
You know, I think they're there
going to be efforts to compare
this guy to Ed Snowden
or to Chelsea Manning.
But I look at this
in a slightly different context.
We saw in the aftermath of January 6th
just this year,
the arrest of three active duty
Marines charged for their participation
in the
the uprising at the Capitol,
the attack on January six.
I think this
there's a bigger concern here
that the sort of
conspiracy theories and or,
you know,
deep state conversation
or anti Ukraine movements,
all those pieces
have infiltrated the U.S.
military and intelligence systems
on some level
that officials
may not completely understand
or have a grasp on yet.
And with those three cases,
they were all over the country
in places
like Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, in
Pendleton, in California,
at the NSA, at Fort Meade.
And now this young man in Massachusetts.
There are young men,
young members of the military
in the intel communities
who may not agree
with this administration
or may have concerns about foreign policy
or intelligence applications
or the justice system.
And to the extent
that they're willing to break the rules,
to break rules around classification,
that's a real concern for the government.
Yeah, I mean, I do wonder,
is that part of the discussion
right now
in the intelligence community
about what this really means
about the types of individuals who are in
the military have access to this
and how they are
using these online communities
to in some ways
kind of self
radicalize on some of these issues
like the war in Ukraine?
Yeah.
So I would just make two quick points.
So the first is that
this individual
who leaked
these documents,
even his friends in this group chat
said categorically
that he is not a whistleblower.
He did not want to be a whistleblower.
The documents
that he was revealing
were really only
to show his friends essentially
what was going on inside the U.S.
government and were not meant,
according to these people in this chat,
to be shared widely.
So this individual was not doing this
because he wanted to expose broadly
to the American public,
these kinds of things.
And then the second, though,
I think to your point,
is that
the vetting
that went into this very young man,
for him to be able
to get
a top secret sensitive
compartmented information clearance,
that is going to probably be
looked at very closely here because
did they look at his online history?
Did they look at his presence
in these chat rooms,
which he had apparently been on
for at least five years
before he got that clearance?
All of these things
the military is going
to have to grapple with.
But their
their point is
that they can't legally kind of monitor
all of this stuff domestically. Right.
Some of that
some of these groups are private.
They're on the Internet,
but they're private. Right.
And so they say that
they focus their intel collection
efforts internationally. Right.
But when it comes to
that vetting process,
I think that's something
that's going to be looked over.
The good news is that this is a grid.
Yes.
Enough that it does
seem like something is going to happen,
that some kind of changes
are going to be made
because we've been talking
about these types of breaches,
not this specific type, but problems
with these types of breaches
for years now.
And we haven't really seen
that fundamental reform.
The embarrassing part of it
is that it keeps happening
and it seems like it literally
I mean, it only takes one person
and the
maybe hundreds of thousands of people
who have these kinds of clearances
across the federal government.