Former Insiders Debunk Air Guardsman-as-Pentagon-Leaker Story as Press Cheers Arrest

By Yves Smith

April 15, 2023: Information Clearing House -- "Naked Capitalism" -- Lambert and I have discussed that this is an oddly quiet news period, as shown by the number of stories appearing in the RSS feeds of major US and foreign press outlets, despite being in the midst of a restructuring of the global order and other rows.¹ However, the remarkable specter of the Washington Post getting ahead of investigators in hot pursuit of the biggest leaker since Edwards Snowden tripped our bullshit detectors.

As writers, we were both triggered by the writing and exposition style of the Washington Post story providing an extraordinary amount of detail about the presumed leaker and gamer called OG in his Discord circle, which Lambert took to stand for the gamer designation “Old Guy.” According to the Post, OG was the head of a small tribe of gamer teens. OG has supposedly been providing detailed written summaries of material he was reading due to his access to classified documents. When he didn’t get the engagement he wanted, he resorted to posting the documents themselves.

As we learned today after he was arrested, OG is 21 year old Air National Guardsman Jake Teixeira who worked at an installation at the Joint Base at Cape Cod.

The Post story was more Michael Lewis than journalism: too much like a screenplay treatment, few of the customary qualifiers about certainty of information, and far too many signs of official help, like the Post claiming it had seen 300 documents, yet not even providing any description their scope or even dates, or how it got to not just one but two members of OG’s group who recognized OG was in trouble yet were so willing to go into tell-all mode.

Of course, a story explaining how something highly embarrassing to the government being very slickly and quickly produced does not mean it’s not true. But it does suggest its tires should be kicked awfully hard.

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson has found a smoking gun: it’s simply not possible for anyone with access to secure military systems to have gotten one of the documents, a CIA product that would reside only on entirely different systems. The entire interview is worth a listen and here are the key quotes.

It’s a lie, it’s a fabrication. This first surfaced with Bellingcat. Bellingcat is a front for British intelligence. That’s where the story first surfaced. Washington Post then picks it up and the Guardian then picks it up, on the same day. So this is a coordinated media strategy, this is a disinformation campaign. The documents are real. I’m not saying the documents are fabrications. But this cover story has been manufactured to explain how these documents came to be produced.

It just falls apart, it simply falls apart based on one document in that mix, which is listed as CIA Operations Center Report, Top Secret. I worked in the CIA Operations Center. I helped prepare those reports. That’s an internal CIA document. No one on a US military base anywhere in the world will have access to this kind of document.

Johnson later points out (at 4:00) that another document was DoJ/FBI/FISA, which again would never be accessible through DoD facilities (their SCIFs). Johnson stresses later that contacts with recent and current knowledge confirm there is no way this type of document could have gone over to the military.

Johnson explains (at 14:00) that even some of the DoD documents required clearances restricted only to about 2% of the military, meaning it was highly unlikely Teixeia had access to them.

He contends that the information that was leaked has to have come at a level over the CIA, specifically, the Director of National Intelligence because it is the one place that collects information from the CIA, FBI, NSA, and military.

At 10:18, Napolitano plays a video clip from the Post of an interview with one of OG/Teixeira’s gamer friends. Johnson explains why sees it as conconcted.

Douglas Macgregor was not quite as skeptical as Johnson, but (not recognizing that some of the documents could never be obtained via a SCIF) thought it was highly unlikely, but not totally impossible, that a young Guardsman could have been given access to classified records above his clearance levels. But Macgregor like Johnson dismissed the Post’s video interview.

Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.  in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

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