Recently, a treasure trove of classified Pentagon documents pertaining to the war in Russia was leaked to the internet.
The documents have since been traced to a 20-something “charismatic gun enthusiast” who works at a military base and has been described as being very fit, according to The Washington 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,” one of the posts sources said of the unnamed military man.
This story begins on Discord, an instant messaging/chatting platform, where roughly two dozen men and boys “united by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God” formed an invitation-only “clubhouse” of sorts back in 2020.
Somewhere along the way, one user named “OG” — who “claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people,” according to the Post — began posting messages “laden with strange acronyms and jargon.”
It’s now known that those messages contained classified U.S. intelligence.
IMPORTANT: Would you like to see the full leak of Pentagon secrets published online and still in the hands of many people right now, including many people right here in the United States? The documents contain information that have not been published in the so-called “BREAKING… pic.twitter.com/kl7Z83SCMC
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) April 12, 2023
“[A] young member [of the Discord group] read OG’s message closely, and the hundreds more that he said followed on a regular basis for months. They were, he recalled, 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,’ which the member declined to identify,” according to the Post.
“OG claimed he spent at least some of his day inside a secure facility that prohibited cellphones and other electronic devices, which could be used to document the secret information housed on government computer networks or spooling out from printers. He annotated some of the hand-typed documents, the member said, translating arcane intel-speak for the uninitiated.”
Why did OG share these documents? He wanted to “keep us in the loop,” the unnamed Discord group member said.
“He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind,” he added.
The problem, of course, is that the documents contained extremely sensitive content that only authorized U.S. government personnel were authorized to review.
“There were top-secret reports about the whereabouts and movements of high-ranking political leaders and tactical updates on military forces, the member said. Geopolitical analysis. Insights into foreign governments’ efforts to interfere with elections. ‘If you could think it, it was in those documents,’” the Post notes.
#PentagonFiles: The leaks from the Pentagon have been monumental, expected at over 100 documents!
The first batch of intel states that Ukrainians killed in action outnumber Russians 4:1, significantly higher than the 50% more Russian casualties mentioned by Western officials and… pic.twitter.com/waEdUI6pzG
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) April 9, 2023
Another member of the Discord group has also corroborated all of this. However, both this member and the original member have refused to publicly reveal OG’s real name.
Eventually, OG went from transcribing the classified documents for his Discord pals to just posting photos of the documents themselves.
All was well until Feb. 28th, when one of the Discord group members took some of OG’s photos and began posting them to another Discord group. From there, the images quickly began spreading to other corners of the platform.
Two months later on April 5th, OG’s content found its way into Telegram, a social media app, and 4chan, a Web-based messaging platform. From there, the content made its way to Twitter, at which point it quickly caught the attention of the feds.
A day later, The New York Times broke the story.
“Classified war documents detailing secret American and NATO plans for building up the Ukrainian military ahead of a planned offensive against Russian troops were posted this week on social media channels, senior Biden administration officials said,” the Times reported.
“The Pentagon is investigating who may have been behind the leak of the documents, which appeared on Twitter and on Telegram, a platform with more than half a billion users that is widely available in Russia,” the legacy paper added.
It looks like The Washington Post might be zeroing in on the person who leaked top secret Pentagon documents on social media. @natashabertrand has the details pic.twitter.com/wTOhc28c0b
— CNN This Morning (@CNNThisMorning) April 13, 2023
Following the Times breaking the story, OG reportedly showed up to the Discord group “frantic, which is unusual for him,” one of the Post’s two sources said.
“He said something had happened, and he prayed to God that this event would not happen. … But now it’s in God’s hands,” the source added.
So what’s to be made of OG? Is he a whistleblower or what? He’s not, according to the Post’s sources.
“I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call OG a whistleblower in the slightest,” one source said.
Why not? Because OG’s original intent had never been to share the documents with the world. He’d just wanted to share them with his Discord homeboys …
