Pentagon Leaker Worked on Military Base, Spread Conspiracies Online: Report

The man behind a massive leak of U.S. secrets was an employee on an unidentified military base who regularly ranted about “government overreach,” members of an online Discord server he controlled told The Washington Post. The man, identified only as “OG” by his fellow Discord users, was the unchallenged leader of the server, portraying himself as “fit,” “strong,” “trained,” and “just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” one member said. OG reportedly also seemed to harbor dark beliefs about deep-rooted government corruption, once sharing on the server a baseless conspiracy theory that the government had had advance notice of a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, but chose not to act. He also began dumping hand-typed transcripts of classified intelligence documents on the server—several a week beginning late last year, according to the Post—and “got upset” when other users didn’t interact with them to his liking. In early April, a day before The New York Times first reported that the documents had leaked to the wider internet, OG came onto the server unusually “frantic,” 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.”