Federal investigators ‘getting close’ on Pentagon leak, Biden says
The massive breach has exposed worldwide U.S. intelligence secrets and angered allies.
Federal investigators looking into the Pentagon document leak are “getting close,” President Joe Biden said on Thursday.
When asked by a reporter in Ireland to provide an update on the investigation, Biden said, “I can’t right now. There’s a full-blown investigation going on, as you know, with the intelligence community and the Justice Department, and they’re getting close.”
He didn’t clarify what “getting close” meant, and the White House deferred comment to the Justice Department, which declined to comment. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“I’m concerned that it happened. But there’s nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that’s of great consequence,” Biden said outside the Irish president’s residence, allaying worries about a massive breach that has exposed worldwide U.S. intelligence secrets and angered allies.
Since the leak became public last week, a trove of classified Pentagon documents have been published sporadically. The Defense Department has so far been unable to make much progress on the leak’s origin, officials said.
“Well, they were somewhere in the web,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters Tuesday, referring to the classified documents. “And where exactly and who had access at that point, we don’t know. We simply don’t know at this point.”
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the original leaker is a young man who worked on a military base, according to a friend in the Discord community where the documents leaked.
While working in a secure facility that contained secret information, the leaker would at first copy the classified documents by hand before posting them to the Discord group composed of religious gun and military enthusiasts, the Post reported. When that became too laborious, he switched to photographing the documents and posting them.
Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.