What to make of the alleged Pentagon document leaker

On Thursday afternoon, federal officials arrested 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, at his home in Dighton, Mass, charging him on Friday with having collected and disseminated a large batch of national security information and classified materials. The leak, which consisted largely of documents relating to Ukraine's ongoing defense against Russia's invasion, has prompted a major Pentagon and State Department scramble to address the fallout from the sudden airing of various national security secrets, while (once again) raising questions about how the United States keeps — and grants access to — its classified materials.

While Teixeira himself is hardly the first member of the amorphous national security "blob" to allegedly leak government secrets, the particulars of his actions — allegedly releasing the documents on a private Discord server occupied largely by teenage gamers — have placed this latest breach in a unique position; absent any statement of motivating ideology to explain his alleged actions so far, Teixeira has become a blank slate for pundits and politicians alike, upon which they have begun projecting their own spin on just who he is, and why he did what he's been accused of doing.

Is he a possible foreign asset?

Before Teixeira was identified and arrested, theories swirled that the massive breach of U.S. military and diplomatic secrets was in some way the work of a foreign government, with a Kremlin spokesperson telling The New York Times that "We all know that there is in fact an inclination to always blame Russia for everything, and to attribute everything to Russia."

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Speaking with Reuters a week before Teixeira's arrest, three separate U.S. officials also pointed to "Russia or pro-Russia elements" as "likely" to be behind the leaks, noting that Russian casualty counts in the documents seemed to have been lowered — at least at some point during their dissemination — according to their "informal" assessments. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, also initially identified the leak as having Russian origins, telling Reuters in a separate interview that "these are just standard elements of operational games by Russian intelligence. And nothing more. Russia is looking for any ways to seize back the initiative. To try to influence the scenarios for Ukraine's counteroffensive plans."

Is he a patriotic hero?

In an interview the day before his arrest, one of his off-line friends described Teixeira to The Washington Post as "patriotic, a devout Catholic and a libertarian with an interest in guns and doubts about America's future."

"He loved America but simply didn't feel confident in its future," the friend claimed. "At the end of the day he would side with this country over any other."

The narrative that Teixeira was acting out of some sense of patriotic duty, or at least with a measure of right-wing-infused incredulity about the country's trajectory, has taken hold among certain conservative circles who have lauded the leak for revealing "the truth," as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote on Twitter shortly after he was identified as a suspect.

In part, Teixeira's alleged leaks have dovetailed with a pre-existing MAGA Republican hostility to the Ukraine-Russian war in general, prompting figures like Greene and Donald Trump Jr. to capitalize on the political fallout for the White House from the documents' release as reason to laud the leaker himself as a fundamentally anti-Biden figure.

During his eponymous program the night of Teixeira's arrest, Fox News host Tucker Carlson also framed the accused leaker in a positive, or at least justified, light, saying "the news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who told Americans what's actually happening in Ukraine. They are treating him like Osama Bin Laden, maybe even worse actually, because, unlike Al Qaeda, apparently, this kid is a racist."

Far-right actor-turned-MAGA-celebrity Randy Quaid also hailed Teixeira as an "American hero" and a "whistleblower," seemingly placing him on the level of more overtly ideologically motivated national security leakers like Chelsea Manning and Daniel Ellsberg.

As Vice News reported on Friday, that sentiment has seeped into far-right message boards across the internet, where "among the numerous threads dedicated to his arrested were ones titled: 'Fucking Legend,' 'May God Watch Over Him,' and 'American Hero Busted for Telling the Truth.'"

Is he a 'right-wing-chud poster'?

"I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call OG a whistleblower in the slightest," one member of the Discord channel where Teixeira allegedly shared his leaks told the Washington Post, using the internet handle he'd used in the group. Instead, the Post said, "the classified documents were intended only to benefit his online family" and shouldn't be compared to those leaked by Ellsberg or Edward Snowden.

"OG didn't leak for patriotism, principle, or even money," longtime national security reporter Spencer Ackerman wrote in his Forever Wars newsletter shortly before Teixeira's arrest. Instead, he allegedly "leaked for that most ineffable thing, something nonmaterial but nevertheless hyper-real in the logic of the poster, and particularly the right-wing-chud poster: clout."

Noting that Teixeira's purported internet presence was typical of a certain style of perpetually online right-wing follower, Ackerman concludes that we will likely see more of this type of leak in the future.