President Joe Biden said the administration is close to uncovering who leaked Pentagon classified documents.
“There’s a full-blown investigation going on right now, as you know, with the intelligence community and the Justice Department, and they’re getting close, but I don’t have an answer,” Biden said.
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Biden, who is visiting with Irish President Michael Higgins in Dublin, said he was “not concerned” with the leaks because the administration believes nothing “contemporaneous” was revealed by the documents. Officials from South Korea, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom have said some of the released documents appear to be fake or changed, though it is not clear who altered them and why.
However, a number of the Pentagon documents suggested that U.S. intelligence penetrated the highest levels of the Russian military, including information from the Russian Defense Ministry outlining attacks against two separate Ukrainian troop positions.
The documents were reportedly leaked sometime in February in an invite-only chat on Discord, a chat server, according to a Washington Post report. However, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said he was made aware of the leaked documents on April 6 and convened military officials for daily updates since April 7.
The Washington Post report indicated that the man who leaked the documents, known as “OG,” allegedly worked on a military base and brought home top secret documents. The group he shared the documents with was reportedly about 25 members, invite-only, and made up of both U.S. citizens and foreigners, created during the COVID-19 pandemic.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby has faced similar questions on the topic. During Monday’s White House press briefing, he repeatedly told reporters that no determinations about the scope of the leak, including if more documents could be released in the future, had been made.
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“I’m not going to speculate on impact on the battlefield, but I will say that, you know, the Ukrainians have demonstrated their capability and competence in this war,” Chris Meagher, assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs, also said Monday when pressed if the documents complicated Ukrainian defense plans.
He continued, “The president and the secretary have both made clear that the United States is going to be with them for as long it takes, and we’re going to continue to work to provide them with the capabilities, with the ammunition, with the equipment, and with the training that they need to be successful in defense of their sovereign territory, so that commitment continues.”
