Does Anyone Believe One Word Of This Jack Teixeira Story?

Starting with the original line that Jack Teixeira's online group was a bunch of right-wing racists. (Teixeira is a Hispanic surname, from any of the places in Portugal and Spain named Teixeira). The US Census Bureau defines "Hispanic" as either someone with a surname that is carried on the Bureau's list of Hispanic surnames, or someone who lived in a household where he or she spoke Spanish as a child. Perhaps the New York Times, among others, could revive the term "white Hispanic".

But beyond that, subsequent accounts have quoted a member of his online group that described him as "Christian, antiwar, just wanted to inform some of his friends about what’s going on,” which would actually fit Christian antiwar protesters of past generations like the Berrigan brothers, Roman Catholic priests who led the antiwar and antidraft movements during the Vietnam War. Neither was a right-wing racist.

But that leaves aside the bigger question of just what the heck is going on here. When I worked in tech, it was sometimes in classified environments. Mr Teixera was a low-level enlisted member whose job was basically to push a cart around the office with spare keyboards and network cables on it. As the link above puts it,

As a cyber transport systems specialist — a military equivalent of an IT specialist — Teixeria was responsible for military communications networks and would have had a higher level of security clearance because he would have also been tasked with ensuring protection for the networks, a defense official told the Associated Press.

Well, ensuring protection of the networks insofar as it involved pushing a cart around the office. But let's say that one day he was pushing his cart around to replace some colonel's keyboard and saw a stack of TOP SECRET documents just left out for anyone to see, and he thought, "gee, my racist right-wing buddies in my online gaming group would love to get their hands on these!" Leaving aside that you're not supposed to leave TOP SECRET documents just lying around for some dude to see while he's pushing a cart, once Mr Teixeira left the building, any cart he pushed, anything he carried, would be inspected, and he'd be busted instantly for having that stuff.

I've been in that environment. You have to be constantly aware of what you're carrying and whether you should be taking it outside. And in fact, most of it is overclassified and utterly harmless if it gets out, but the rules are the rules, and to work in that environment, you have to follow the rules. So just as someone who sometimes worked in a classified environment along with the guys who pushed the carts around, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

But don't just take my word for it:

Kash Patel, former chief of staff at the Pentagon and former deputy director of National Intelligence, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Friday, questioned the evolving narrative over the Pentagon leaks — specifically that a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard reservist acted alone to leak top secret military data.

Patel, a former federal prosecutor, said he does not believe “for a single second, this guy — a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman — ran this operation alone.”

Patel said, first, the suspected leaker, Jack Teixeira, would not have had access to the information without someone within the Department of Defense (DOD) or the intelligence community giving it to him, providing it to him, or telling him it should be put out there. “It’s just not possible,” he said.

This generally fits with my experience. Classified information basically doesn't sit on someone's desk where a guy pushing a cart can find it, and the guy pushing a cart would have to know what it was worth even if he found it -- and that leaves aside how he could get hundreds of paper pages out of the secured facility without being searched and caught. Trust me, any time I left work at a classified facility, any briefcase, any manila envelope, any book or magazine I had, was thumbed through. Patel goes on,

“That the New York Times and Washington Post ‘broke’ this story, that also leads me to believe it’s the same tradecraft from Russiagate, that when deep state actors want stuff out there, they put it out to their sources,” he said. “Am I to believe that these two newspapers found this guy out first, before the FBI? That’s absurd. That’s the timeline we’re being told. So now, we have better investigators at the New York Times and the Washington Post than in the FBI?”

Patel's conclusion is at least credible:

He said the intelligence shows that the Pentagon and President Joe Biden have been lying to the American people about how well the Ukraine War was doing.

“I think the substance of the intel…it says basically, our effort in the Ukraine, our $100 billion effort, is failing,” he said.

A different source who's from a different political faction has a somewhat similar take:

Former CIA officer Larry Johnson, who did presidential daily briefings during the George H.W. Bush administration, told "Judging Freedom" host Andrew Napolitano that he thinks the latest leak of Ukraine War documents is an inside job.

This is the same Larry Johnson who, not long before the 9/11 attack, minimized the threat of Islamic terrorism and said, "The danger, I think that has happened is we've tended to make Osama bin Laden as sort of a superman in Muslim garb. I mean,he's 10 feet tall, he's everywhere, he knows everyhthing and bhe can't be challenged." So although he's well past his sell-by date, here's what he's had to say about the Teixeira case:

"The information was leaked for [a purpose], to prepare the U.S. public for the crash landing that's going to take place with respect to U.S. foreign policy," he said.

This is a coordinated media strategy, this is a disinformation campaign. The documents are real. I’m not saying the documents are fabrications, they are not. But this cover story that's been manufactured to explain how these documents came to be produced, it just falls apart. It simply falls apart based on one document, which is listed as "CIA Operations Center Report: Top Secret." I worked in the CIA operations center, and I helped prepare those reports, that's an internal CIA document. No one on a U.S. military base anywhere in the world will have access to that kind of document.

So just as a now-and-then visitor to the classified world, I'm seeing things that don't fit, but people who've been at or near the top of that environment are also seeing things that make them ask what's really going on. Unfortunately, the reporters are still getting over spring break, and the stories so far are days old. We'll just have to wait and see.