Good morning. The man responsible for the leak of hundreds of classified Pentagon documents is reported to be a young, racist gun enthusiast who worked on a military base, and who was seeking to impress two dozen fellow members of an internet chat group. The Washington Post interviewed a teenage member of the group, who described the man, referred to by the initials “OG”, from their online correspondence, and shared photographs and videos. The Post also viewed a video of a man identified as OG at a shooting range with a large rifle. “He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target,” the report said. OG told fellow members of the internet group that he worked on a military base, which was not named in the report, where his job involved viewing large amounts of classified information. The leaked documents have laid bare secrets about Ukraine’s preparations for a spring counter-offensive, US spying on allies such as Ukraine, South Korea and Israel, and the tensions between Washington and allied capitals over arming Kyiv. Why did he have security clearance? There is increasing evidence that the leak was not an intelligence operation by a state actor aiming to discredit the US, but more likely the consequence of a Pentagon policy of granting top secret security clearances to huge numbers of service members, civilians and contractors. The number of employees and contractors in the entire US government with top secret clearance is about 1.25 million
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There are now reportedly photos of 300 classified documents linked to the Pentagon leaks, three times the original number. Photograph: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images