In what has to be the most laughable statement of the week, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed to get tough, make an example of, and send a message in the wake of the arrest of Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, who's accused of spreading some of America's most vital classified secrets on the web, which ended up on enemy social media sites.
According to Agence France-Presse:
US Attorney General Merrick Garland said there were "very serious penalties" associated with the crimes.
"People who sign agreements to be able to receive classified documents acknowledge the importance to the national security of not disclosing those documents, and we intend to send that message (about) how important it is to our national security," Garland added.
Take it from Mr. Tough. Spreading state secrets now won't be tolerated.
Which indeed is laughable, given the coddling a slew of traitors in recent years have gotten from past Democrat administrations -- from Bradley/Chelsea Manning, to Bowe Bergdahl, to Reality Winner, plus Ed Snowden, who slipped through their fingers. The soft treatment all of these creeps got, plus the amazing slew of leaks from various Democrat political figures with access to classified material, has demonstrated the exact opposite message, which is that leaking classified information and betraying one's comrades in battle is not a big deal, not compared to the transgender agenda, or wokester criticism of U.S. foreign policy. Garland's statement reminds me of the Twinkie housewife in the 1979 televison ad who justified serving the famous junk food sponge cakes to her kids as "my tough standards." The sheer softness these characters have gotten for their flamingly treasonous acts has pretty well left the barn door open.
So it's with more than a jaded eye that once one looks into the background of Teixeira, and finds that he was a very young kid of 21 whose views seemed to indicate that of a disgruntled libertarian, apparently that one wonders if this, like everything else in the Biden administration, was more politicized justice. One standard for the leftist traitors, another for those on the right,
It gets even more antennae-raising when the matter is brought up as to whether Teixeira really did it on his own.
Right now, there's speculation emerging suggesting that maybe he was set up, maybe he was a fall guy, maybe he was a convenient instrument for either a foreign power, or for some leftist whose agenda is getting Joe Biden out of Ukraine.
Start with this piece by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:
None of the rest of us could explain how an enlistee in the Air National Guard got his hands on highly classified military and diplomatic intelligence leaked over the past few months. Now it turns out that the Pentagon doesn’t have a good answer for that question, either. The Wall Street Journal refers to it as “among the most puzzling questions” of the case, and the Pentagon’s lack of explanation for it is not building much confidence in opsec:
In other words, if he didn't have access to all of those documents he spread around to share with his little friends in his internet chat group, then someone else did. Who was it, and why did he give those document to Teixeira to spread around?
Breitbart News has and excellent timeline of how the documents were slowly spread around over a period of a few months:
The leaker swore other group members to secrecy about the materials he was posting – a promise they kept with surprising fidelity, all things considered. Some of them told the media it took them a while to accept that he was posting genuine classified material, instead of fabrications he boastfully invented to make himself look important.
...
How did he get caught? The code of silence on Thug Shaker Central held remarkably firm until last month, at which time some of the members began sharing “OG’s” posts and classified documents in other Discord groups, apparently because they wanted to impress other users or win arguments with them.
They were an immature bunch, many of them minors, and well, this is how the intelligence documents did spread around the internet and into the hands of the enemy.
Garland, for all his newfound umbrage about the spilling of secrets, was curiously circumspect about the possibility that more than one actor may be involved in this dissemination of U.S. state secrets. That someone might have handed the secrets to Teixeira to leak, and if so, why such a person would have done it.
A conspiracy theorist could ask: Was Garland vowing to punish Teixeira hard to keep him from spilling the beans about who gave him the documents?
Out in the intelligence community, that certainly is seen as an increasingly likely possibility, according to this transcript of an interview between Larry Johnson and Andrew Napolitano, by former FBI agent Mark Wauck. Wauck comments:
What Johnson is maintaining is that this was a controlled operation that goes to the highest levels of the Intel Community (IC).
As evidence he points out that one of the documents is an internal CIA document—IOW, as internal it would never have been disseminated to other agencies, not even within the IC.
He also cites a FISA document—which means that the document was internal to the DoJ/FBI. That’s another document—if true—that would not be disseminated without being written up in some other form.
He also maintains that he has scoured the internet trying to find the 50+ docs, but can only come up with a dozen. Where is the trove of docs that we’re being told about? And what’s with the simultaneous leaks of the story to the WaPo and The Guardian?
Wauck's now looking into this case as a possible "deep state coup" with Teixeira the useful pawn:
Let me suggest one possibility for this leak — create a predicate for forcing Joe Biden from office. The revelations in the classified documents are not fabrications designed to deceive the Russians. Nor are they the kind of material to rally more U.S. support for pouring more resources into the black hole of Ukraine. These leaks feed the meme that the Biden team is incompetent and endangering American interests overseas.
Wauck, as well as John Hinkeraker at Power Line finds it passing strange that the Washington Post and the New York Times, were the ones who identified the leaker -- both have been known to be conduits for the government to leak to the public.
I take it that the Post has precisely those two sources for the story along with material provided by the young source. Unlike the Post’s promotion of the Russia hoax, the sources for the current story do not appear to be deep state functionaries. It’s a long story and I may have missed something, yet I find no hint in the the Post story how the reporters tumbled to OG’s friend or the second source.
Neither the FBI nor the Pentagon has yet identified the leaker. One infers from the story that the Post has beat them to it. The FBI is busy worrying about the Catholic Church and the Pentagon about spreading the woke doctrine. This is the concluding paragraph of the story:
To date, no federal law enforcement officials have contacted the young group member. Asked why he was prepared to help OG even at the risk of his own freedom, the young man replied without hesitation: “He was my best friend.”
This does not exactly compute:
In his final message to his companions, OG admonished them to “keep low and delete any information that could possibly relate to him,” the member said. That included any copies of the classified documents OG had shared.
Which lays out a lot of unanwered questions about the backstory to this case here. Could this be a set up for the immature kid to take the fall and the Biden administration to intone about the threat of rightwingers to U.S. secrets? Could it be a setup for the immature kid to take the fall and the deep state to cover up its fingerprints in what could be a planned coup against Biden? Could be a number of things, and Garland's sudden concern about the spreading of state secrets is a definitely red flag of something going on.
Image: Screen shot from video posted by ABC News, via YouTube