The top-secret document leak panicking U.S. officials
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 April 2023
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
The photos of top-secret Pentagon documents first started appearing online on Discord, a chat platform popular with gamers. But where did they come from? And just how many military secrets do they contain?
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Last week, reports surfaced that a trove of classified documents was leaked on a number of social media platforms. The documents cover worldwide intelligence briefings, assessments of Ukraine’s defense capabilities, and the highly classified methods the United States uses to collect information.
But were these documents real? U.S. officials who spoke to The Washington Post said that some of the materials did not appear forged. Still, some documents appeared to be manipulated, including data from the Ukraine war that suggested Russian casualties were not as high as reported.
Today on the show, national security reporter Alex Horton walks through the origin of the leaked documents, how the Justice Department is investigating these revelations, and what consequences these could have for the war in Ukraine, and the rest of the world.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Okay, so you saw these documents, what was your reaction? |
| 0:05.8 | And what do they actually look like? |
| 0:07.6 | I was astounded to see these documents just staring at me face, you know, with the little |
| 0:13.6 | discord markings of like, oh my god, I've used discord to play Call of Duty and now I'm |
| 0:18.4 | looking at these classified documents that were just discussed in this open forum. |
| 0:28.1 | Alex Horton is a national security reporter for the post. |
| 0:32.3 | Over the last week, Alex has been looking closely at this trove of documents that contain |
| 0:37.7 | secrets from the top tiers of the US government. |
| 0:41.6 | Think classified intelligence briefings, spy strategies, sensitive information about how |
| 0:47.4 | Ukraine is doing in the war against Russia. |
| 0:50.8 | And it all took officials by surprise when they first appeared on a discord server, this |
| 0:56.0 | chat platform typically used by gamers. |
| 0:59.4 | So I think the reaction was, wow, this is substantial. |
| 1:03.5 | And then it was, why do these documents look so strange? |
| 1:06.9 | These are just printout of PowerPoints that you might do after like your college chemistry |
| 1:12.7 | class. |
| 1:13.7 | And they're like folded, haphazardly, they're crinkled. |
| 1:17.6 | There's a coffee table in the background. |
| 1:19.3 | So obviously someone held them in their hands, took their phone and just started snapping |
| 1:24.8 | these images that are sort of a skew. |
| 1:27.8 | It was just one of those. |
| 1:29.4 | Yeah, we're in very much a post-modern society where the highest closely guarded secrets |
... |
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