You’ve surely heard about the stupid kid in the Air National Guard who was leaking secret documents to impress his gamer buddies. The kid is only an airman 1st class, but he was also an I.T. specialist in an intelligence unit connected to NORAD, it says here. So he had access to all kinds of top secret information relating to “foreign aircraft, air-defense weapons, military operations, and foreign-policy decisions.” He would have had to sign a document “acknowledging the possible penalties for a violation,” but he did it anyway. And just for the jollies, not for money or ideology. NORAD will have to tighten its security, possibly starting with a provision that no personnel with access to sensitive documents are arrested adolescents.
But the weird thing is that the Right is embracing the kid, Jack Teixeira, as its new righteous cause. For example:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Thursday defended the man arrested in connection with a high-profile investigation into leaked classified documents.
In a tweet just hours after the FBI arrested Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, 21, Greene, R-Ga., praised his alleged actions and implied President Joe Biden was “the real enemy.”
“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more,” Greene, a member of the Homeland Security Committee, said on Twitter. “Ask yourself who is the real enemy?”
Why, you’re the real enemy, Marjorie! Thanks for asking! And yes, the leaked documents showed that there were all of 14 special forces U.S. troops “on the ground” in Ukraine.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told Fox News on Wednesday that a “small U.S. military presence” was stationed at the American embassy in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
“I won’t talk to the specifics of numbers and that kind of thing. But to get to your exact question, there is a small U.S. military presence at the embassy in conjunction with the Defense Attaché’s Office to help us work on accountability of the material that is going in and out of Ukraine,” Kirby said. “So they’re attached to that embassy and to that defense attaché.”
Those troops “are not fighting on the battlefield,” Kirby said.
Kirby added: “There has been no change to the president’s mandate that there will not be American troops in Ukraine fighting in this war.”
Liz Cheney thinks Greene should lose her security clearance for defending Teixeira. Sounds about right.
FOX NEWS’ TUCKER Carlson gave a bizarre defense of suspected intelligence leaker Jack Teixeira on Thursday night. The primetime host claimed that federal authorities arrested Teixeira to cover up a covert, illegal US presence in Ukraine, and as punishment for contradicting “the National Security State and their obedient servants in the media.”
Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, is suspected of having posted highly classified documents on a private Discord server. The documents were later reposted from the server to other public forums.
“Tonight, the news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine,” Carlson told viewers. He continued, “They are treating him like Osama Bin Laden, maybe even worse actually, because, unlike Al Qaeda, apparently, this kid is a racist.” The host was referring to reports that the Discord server in which Teixeira shared the documents contained several racist memes.
Worse than Osama bin Laden? Yes, being taken into custody is so much worse than being killed in a commando raid and dumped in the ocean. And troops assigned to a U.S. embassy are not “illegal.”
Greene is too stupid to appreciate that the defense of Ukraine really is in U.S. interest. Tucker is not, but doesn’t care. An opportunity to bash the Biden administration takes precedence over national security, you know.
In other news — Lawrence O’Donnell on Clarence Thomas:
Justice Thomas failed to disclose a real estate transaction, which was the sale of his mother’s house to conservative billionaire donor Harlan Crow. And the cute part is that Clarence Thomas’s mother still lives in the house, which Crow has renovated at his expense on her behalf. We don’t know if any rent is being paid to Crow.
Corruption, much?