The Washington Post has a long, exclusive story about the leaker of classified documents that the entire US intel community is hunting down. The leaker is allegedly a member of a chat group on Discord who has been copying information for months. He goes by the name OG. [The government seems to be prepared to describe him as a right-winger.]
When his friends in the group didn’t react to some of the startling revelations, he began to take photos and share them. His group friend said most people knew not to share the information, but recently another teenage chat friend from another group shared them. He deeply regrets it since it has blown up.
His blogging friend says he doesn’t believe he did it to become a whistleblower and never meant it to go beyond the group. Now that it has gone viral, OG is terrified.
“The man behind the massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies, revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic,” The Post reports.
The Post says the group is united by “their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers.”
Then later in the story, they write that OG was upset because they knew about the Buffalo white supremacist before the murders and did nothing. [The Buffalo shooter was a hardened leftist.]
At least one of the (highly classified) documents appeared to have been printed from Intellipedia, a data-sharing system that intelligence agencies use to collaborate and post reports and articles.
The member (who spoke with WaPo) said OG wasn’t hostile to the U.S. government, and he insisted that he was not working on behalf of any country’s interests. “He is not a Russian operative. He is not a Ukrainian operative,” the member said. The room on the server where he posted the documents was called “bear-vs-pig,” meant to be a snide jab at Russia and Ukraine, and an indication that OG took no sides in the conflict.
But OG had a dark view of the government. The young member said he spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.”
OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The attack left 10 dead, all of them Black, and wounded three more. OG said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption.
OG’s group itself had a dark side. The Discord server’s eventual name, Thug Shaker Central, was a racist allusion, and signaled to members that they were free to hurl epithets and crude jokes. The young member expressed some regret for their behavior but seemed to shrug off the offensive remarks as a clumsy attempt at humor.
All winter, OG uploaded documents to the server. No one talked about sharing them elsewhere. Then, unbeknown to the group, on Feb. 28, another teenage user from the Thug Shaker Central server began posting several dozen photographs showing classified documents on another Discord server affiliated with the YouTuber “wow_mao.” Some of the documents offered detailed assessments of Ukraine’s defense capabilities and showed how far U.S. intelligence could see into Russia’s military command.
On March 4, 10 documents appeared on “Minecraft Earth Map,” a Discord server focused on the popular video game. A user operating the account that posted the smaller tranche of images told The Post they obtained them on wow_mao.
Secret and top-secret documents were now available to thousands of Discord users, but the leak wouldn’t come to the attention ofU.S. authorities for another month. Meanwhile, OG stopped sharing images in the middle of March. On April 5, classified documents assessing the war in Ukraine were posted on Russian Telegram channels and the message board platform 4chan, and began migrating to Twitter. One image, showing a March 1 Ukraine status update, had been crudely doctored to inflate the number of Ukrainian casualties and downplay those on the Russian side.
The next day, shortly before the New York Times first reported on the leak, OG came into the server “frantic, which is unusual for him,” the member 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.
Remarkably, the member said he has been in touch with OG in the past few days, even as an FBI manhunt is underway and the Pentagon launches its own inquiry into the leaks. After shuttering the Thug Shaker Central server, OG moved the community to another server to communicate with his online family.
He “seemed very confused and lost as to what to do,” the member said. “He’s fully aware of what’s happening and what the consequences may be. He’s just not sure on how to go about solving this situation. … He seems pretty distraught about it.
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.
When it dawned on them that OG was in grave peril and intended to disappear, the members of Thug Shaker Central “full-on sobbed and cried,” the young member said. “It is like losing a family member.”
The member who spoke to the Post said the world needs to see the documents. Allegedly, members included people from all over the world, but people from the Middle East and former Soviet bloc countries were most interested.
That led the US to say it allowed Russia to alter the documents.
This is WaPo, and they’re left-wing activists. This may or may not be true.