Pentagon leaks: Washington Post reports source of leaks a gun lover in his 20s
Visit our website:
http://www.france24.com
Like us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/France24_en
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 For more on this, I'm joined by our international affairs commentator, Douglas Herbert.
00:03 So Doug, there's a national security investigation underway.
00:06 In the meantime, it's the Washington Post that gets the scoop on the the leaker's identity.
00:11 How did this happen?
00:12 It happened because a member of this discord server group, a friend of the the presumed
00:18 leaker, approached the Washington Post and was ready to give them hours of interviews,
00:23 detailed interviews, as we just saw in that report, talking about the members, what this,
00:28 you know, the presumed leaker, a man that everyone commonly called OG, you know, shared
00:34 this all this group was said to to share, have be like minded on issues of God and guns
00:39 and and and military gear.
00:42 They all had these common interests.
00:44 They came together.
00:45 But it is quite incredible when you think about it, what the Washington Post picked
00:49 up here, because as the article itself points out, to date, no federal law enforcement official
00:55 in the US.
00:56 Remember, there's a posse of everyone in the intelligence and military community community
01:00 right now on on a 24 hour manhunt for this guy.
01:04 No one had approached the member of this group that spoke to The Washington Post.
01:07 No one had approached him, you know, so far to date.
01:11 So presumably, you know, they came to The Washington Post now, you know, and this member
01:15 was under 18.
01:17 So actually, the paper said that they got permission from his mother in order to conduct
01:21 these interviews to video record them.
01:23 And the member himself, the one speaking to The Post said that he did not want his voice
01:27 obscured.
01:29 So he had absolutely no compunction, no qualms about speaking to The Post about this.
01:34 What's interesting here is, you know, The Post also got a cache of at least 300 classified
01:40 photos that it was able to review copies of texts that were apparently handwritten texts
01:45 that were apparently written by this by this leaker known as OG, like I said, before he
01:51 actually started taking pictures of a lot of these documents, he had handwritten them.
01:56 Audio recordings of him presumably talking to apparently talking to other members of
02:00 this discord server group.
02:03 So and recordings of him having discussions with them.
02:06 So it was quite extensive, the cache of sort of sourcing and information that The Washington
02:11 Post got before running with this story.
02:14 That said, how did it leak itself?
02:16 How did the leak leak?
02:18 The leak came out of the server group around the end of February.
02:20 I think it was around February 28th or so when one of the teenagers in this group apparently
02:26 posted some of those documents on another discord server forum associated with another
02:32 YouTuber and then someone from that group posted them to to a gaming app associated
02:37 with Minecraft.
02:38 So it all leaked and leaked and leaked and led to the big international revelations.
02:42 In the meantime, we're learning more and more revelations as these documents are coming
02:46 out and we understand them more.
02:48 There's a separate report in The New York Times based on some of these leaks revealing
02:51 there's broad infighting among Russian officials with regard to the war in Ukraine.
02:57 Why is that significant?
02:58 It's significant, hardly shocking.
03:00 We have been saying all along that the Russians, it's been quite a no brainer that the Russians
03:04 have clearly, at least in their official public disclosures about their casualties and their
03:08 death toll, their losses on the battlefield in Ukraine, have been severely underestimating
03:13 the scale of the toll.
03:15 It was last September that we last got any sort of official figure from the Russians.
03:19 It was Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu back then gave, you know, a derisive figure.
03:24 It was something like 5,937 Russians killed on the battlefield.
03:29 5,937 was official back in September.
03:32 What the American previous estimates had been are up to up to 200,000, perhaps, Russian
03:38 losses.
03:39 What these leaked documents are now suggesting is that the Russians have actually suffered
03:43 anywhere from just over 189,000 to upwards of 223,000 casualties as of February.
03:51 And that includes 43,000 troops killed in action.
03:55 How does that compare to the Ukrainian estimates also from these leaked documents?
03:59 Anywhere from 124,000, a little more, to 131,000 Ukrainian casualties.
04:05 So slightly less than the Russian estimates, but still very significant.
04:09 And on the Ukrainian side, an estimated 17,500 killed in action.
04:13 But what this New York Times report is basically saying is that there is a lot of feuding,
04:17 a lot of finger pointing and a lot of strife within the Russian government at top levels
04:23 with intelligence officials pointing the finger at military officials, the defense ministry,
04:29 chiding them, dressing them down, essentially, for not being upfront and more straightforward
04:34 about the casualty figures.
04:36 So there's dissension on that front within the government.
04:39 And I will just note that the article also reports information from another leaked intelligence
04:44 assessment that Vladimir Putin had convened a meeting between the defense minister, Sergei
04:48 Shoigu recently, and the chief of the mercenary group Wagner, Evgeny Prigozhin, convened a
04:55 meeting between them basically to try to get them to iron things out.
04:58 You remember Prigozhin had been basically railing against the defense ministry and the
05:03 government for not giving him and his forces, his men, enough weapons at one point, and
05:08 suddenly he seemed to have more weapons.
05:10 Perhaps that was a result, perhaps, of this meeting forcibly convened by Vladimir Putin
05:15 to get these men to work together rather than being at loggerheads all the time.
05:20 So another very interesting revelation, which really goes to the heart of just how deeply
05:23 American intelligence penetrated the top levels of Russian military and intelligence circles.
05:28 And I have a feeling we're going to continue to cover these revelations as they come out.
05:32 International Affairs Commentator Douglas Herbert. Doug, thanks as always.