The Department of Defense has been rocked by the recent leak from an insider mole. But there’s something scarier that no one wants to talk about.
And you have to see the chilling revelations from the Pentagon’s classified documents scandal.
It seems like ever since Donald Trump was president, deep state actors have been leaking secret information at an alarming rate.
Sure, it isn’t the biggest concern when a president’s private conversations are given to the media.
But when military and intelligence secrets are dropped from the inside, there’s a problem.
And the recent batch of classified information that was dropped spells danger for countless Americans.
According to experts, the leaked Pentagon documents will have a compounding effect of distracting policymakers from other, more pressing issues of national security and undermining partners’ trust in the country’s capacity to protect intelligence and agents.
“For the diplomats, this is going to take up a lot of oxygen that would otherwise be devoted to high priorities in our bilateral relations with many of the countries that are mentioned in these documents like South Korea, Turkey, Egypt, Israel,” former CIA station chief Dan Hoffman told Fox News Digital. “We’re going to be talking about this stuff.”
On Thursday, FBI agents detained Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Douglas Teixeira at his house in North Dighton, Massachusetts, in connection with a trove of secret data published online in recent months.
Teixeira, 21, is being investigated by Attorney General Merrick Garland for “alleged unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified national defense information.”
Former Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Anderson stated that he fully expected “many, many decades in a federal prison” following a conviction, but that in the immediate aftermath, the US must guarantee that allied confidence is restored.
“It’s important in the aftermath of this that there be a very thorough internal investigation as to what happened, and a congressional inquiry,” Anderson said. “That’s what will be necessary to help convince allies and partners that we’re doing everything in our power to try to prevent similar episodes from recurring in the future.”
“If we fail to convince them of our seriousness on this point, then they will be less likely to want to share sensitive intelligence with the United States government, and that would be most unfortunate,” he added.
Hoffman emphasized the harm the leaks have done to the CIA and intelligence assets on the ground, some of whom will have lost faith in the United States’ capacity to preserve their most sensitive material.
“Our sources, existing ones, and those whom we hope to recruit are going to wonder whether we can protect their information and their identities,” he argued. “Our people out in the field — my former colleagues at the CIA, even — have to reassure existing sources and potential sources that we can do that despite these leaks, and that’s a that’s not easy to do.”
“People are going to be taken off-line to deal with this counterintelligence flap, and the opportunity cost of that is they’re not going to do other stuff they’ve got to deal with that is a high priority, and that’s not good for our national security, either,” he added.
The leaks, according to Rebekah Koffler, president of Doctrine & Strategy Consulting and a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, could have a “destructive impact” on the country’s ability to collect intelligence.
“It takes years to recruit human sources who are willing to betray their country and steal secrets from his/her country’s government and provide them to the United States,” she explained. “It takes years and billions of dollars to map out access to adversarial (or allied) networks and systems, in order to intervene in their communications,” Koffler explained.
“Now, some of these sources and channels will be patched up, closed, and unusable by U.S. spy agencies. And massive amounts of taxpayers’ money will be wasted,” she added. “Overall, the impact of this leak is disastrous.”
Stay tuned to The Federalist Wire.
