Free Republic

None of the rest of us could explain how an enlistee in the Air National Guard got his hands on highly classified military and diplomatic intelligence leaked over the past few months. Now it turns out that the Pentagon doesn’t have a good answer for that question, either. The Wall Street Journal refers to it as “among the most puzzling questions” of the case, and the Pentagon’s lack of explanation for it is not building much confidence in opsec: The leak was “a deliberate criminal act, a violation of those guidelines,” Pentagon press secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder...

NATO Special Forces are already present in Ukraine, leaked Pentagon documents have revealed, raising the fear of direct clash between the Russian forces and the Western military bloc. There is no clarity regarding the exact role of the NATO forces in Ukraine, but Moscow has been repeatedly saying that the military bloc is directly involved in the conflict. ...

The man behind a hugely embarrassing leak of highly classified military documents is believed to be a young gun enthusiast who shared the secrets in a group for gamers. Known as "OG" in the Discord chatroom, the man allegedly claimed to spend parts of his day inside a secure facility where phones were banned, according to a story published by the Washington Post. He initially typed up versions of highly secret documents and posted them for the group of about 25 active members from various countries to read, but later switched to posting slews of photos of the documents themselves....

A summary of what we know so far. How did the documents find their way online? Some of the papers were initially circulated in early March on Discord, a social platform that is popular mostly among gamers. One server on which the data first appeared was actually focused on the popular computer game Minecraft, while another was dedicated to a Filipino YouTube star. They have since been shut down. The investigative website Bellingcat contacted members of the Discord community, who said that many more documents had been published on other Discord servers in recent months. These claims could not be...

Top Secret documents detailing the state of readiness of Ukraine’s forces as well as detailed planning information around equipment inflow, weather, ammunition expenditure, training and much more have been circulating on Telegram and Twitter. The documents titled "Russia / Ukraine | Status of the Conflict as of 1 Mar" appears to be a daily briefing document with a classification higher than top secret, giving clues to the sources of the information within it, and a caveat of "NOFORN," which means No Foreign Dissemination, so for US eyes only. Some of the pages have lesser classifications and are designed for release...

Classified war documents detailing secret American and NATO plans for building up the Ukrainian military...were posted this week on social media channels, senior Biden administration officials said...the documents appear to have been modified...overstating American estimates of Ukrainian war dead and understating estimates of Russian troops killed...But the disclosures in the original documents, which appear as photographs of charts of anticipated weapons deliveries, troop and battalion strengths, and other plans,...

The protection of secrecy is as applicable to President Trump as it is to anyone else...It is likely that a serious felony has been committed right under District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s nose and he is not investigating it. Under New York law, it is a felony to leak confidential grand jury information, such as whether the jurors voted to indict. The protection of secrecy is as applicable to President Trump as it is to anyone else. We know that the information was disclosed while the indictment itself remains sealed and before any official announcement was made or charges brought. It...

Drip, drip, drip. The politicization scandal at the Department of Defense grows a little each day as more Republicans come forward. Two more have gone public with notices from the Air Force that their confidential files got handed over to Abraham Payton of Due Diligence Group (DDG), a Democrat oppo-research firm that worked for House Democrats last cycle.And kudos to Politico for staying on top of it, too:Sam Peters, a Republican who challenged Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) in November, and Kevin Dellicker, who fell short in the GOP primary race to take on Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), both received Feb....

Ho hum, nothing to see here, except the Department of Defense helping Democrats defeat Republicans in elections. It turns out that Jennifer-Ruth Green, whose congressional campaign got upended when her victimization by sexual assault got exposed, was not the only Republican to have a confidential file leaked to the opposition. And give Politico some credit for keeping up with the story: Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) was informed of the “unauthorized release” in a letter from the Air Force obtained by POLITICO. Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa) said in a statement that he was told by the Air Force that his own...

The Supreme Court has been under attack since the 2020 election, with protests outside the homes of judges, an unprecedented leak, and now scrutiny in the professions of family members. SCOTUS released its report earlier this month into who might have leaked the draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito concerning returning the question of abortion back to the states. The report did not find the leak, but one lawmaker has expressed an opinion on the matter.Now there is a question about the professional work of one of the justices’ wives. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s wife could face...

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on Friday formally declassified an image then-US President Donald Trump tweeted in 2019 of a highly classified satellite photograph depicting the site of a failed Iranian rocket launch. NPR reported that the NGA declassified the image after a “grueling Pentagon-wide review to determine whether the briefing slide it came from could be shared with the public” in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the radio network. Many details on the original image remain redacted – a clear sign that Trump was sharing some of the US government's most prized intelligence on social media,...

The Swedish Coast Guard (SCG) said they found a fourth leak in Nord Stream pipelines on September 29, 2022, just 3 days after underwater explosions severely damaged two Nord Stream 1 pipes and one Nord Stream 2.1 NS 1 and 2 are key underwater pipelines built to deliver Russian natural gas to Germany. Nord Stream AG – a Switzerland-based consortium for the construction and operation of the Nord Stream (Nord Stream 1) said earlier this week the damage is unprecedented. Due to the severity of the damage, the repairs would take several months or more. The fourth leak was detected...

This is what Ginni Thomas read in her statement to the January 6 committee: "First, I want to thank the Committee for your patience as I recovered from hip replacement surgery." "Second, I am here voluntarily to answer questions about my activities regarding the 2020 election, which, I think you will find were minimal and mainstream." "However, as my counsel has expressed, I am concerned that there may be more than a few questions about my husband’s work, which I do not believe is within the scope of this committee’s jurisdiction." "Since I was the Nebraska College Republican Chair in...

The left is very upset because instead of being cast into prison on his recent trip to Washington DC, President Donald J. Trump, a freeman, photographs of Trump boarding a plane loaded with heavy file boxes re-surfaced when Trump was relocating from his Florida family home, Mar-a-Lago, to his Bedminster golf club for the Summer.The DailyMail.com video from May 2021 showed the former president and Melania decamp to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, after wintering in Florida after they left the White House.Disgraced Peter Strzok posted about the May footage, along with what Strzok feels is a ‘smoking...

Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson described the Left's "psychodramas" used to divert from issues that matter most to the American people on Tuesday's "The Ingraham Angle." VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: It's really ironic because, why were we leaking? Because we had this disinterested special master that was taking charge, and they were going to adjudicate the entire file. It was almost like they went into panic and they wanted to prejudice whatever that finding might be by polluting the well. And then the two authors of The Washington Post news scoop, Mr. Barrett and Leonnig, they were essential in...

Hydrogen is extremely useful as a rocket fuel. It’s readily available, clean, lightweight, and, when combined with liquid oxygen, burns with extreme intensity. To keep it from evaporating or boiling off, rockets fueled with liquid hydrogen must be carefully insulated from all sources of heat...venting is necessary to prevent the tank from exploding..liquid hydrogen can leak through minute pores in welded seams. When tanking SLS, the sudden influx of cryogenic hydrogen causes significant changes to the rocket’s physical structure. The 130-foot-tall (40-meter-tall) hydrogen tank shrinks about 6 inches (152 mm) in length and about 1 inch (25.4 mm) in diameter...

The federal judge’s 24-page order further calls into question the DOJ’s targeting of Trump. A federal judge on Monday granted former President Donald Trump’s request for the appointment of a special master to review the documents seized by the FBI during a raid on his Mar-a-Lago home last month. Presiding Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, further held that the Department of Justice cannot review or use for criminal investigative purposes any material seized pending the review process. Besides handing Trump a victory in his battle for some oversight of the Biden administration’s digging into his documents, Cannon highlighted several...

Below is my column in the New York Post on the opposition of the Justice Department to release of even a redaction affidavit in the ongoing controversy over the raid at Mar-a-Lago. As this litigation unfolds (including a key filing today), the Justice Department has been reportedly leaking some of the very same information to the press. In addition, National Archives and Records Administration released a letter contradicting claims of the Trump team, including refuting claims of cooperation or transparency by the former president. There has never been a more important time for Attorney General Merrick Garland to show leadership...

It is litigation by leak where the government prevents others (including the target) from seeing key representations made to the court while releasing selective facts to its own advantage. It shows utter contempt for the court and the public.

Reality Winner smuggled a top-secret NSA dossier out of her office at a US government IT contractor by hiding it in her pantyhose, she told special agents.That's according to a transcript, released this week, of her interview with investigators who showed up at her house in Georgia, USA, to grill her. If you've ever wondered what it must be like being interrogated and coaxed by Uncle Sam's g-men, wonder no more: it's all laid out in this court filing, revealing the special agents' interviewing techniques.Winner, 25, is accused of printing off NSA files that claim Russian spies hacked at least...