The 21-year-old appears to have been part of a small group on the Discord social media platform. He first wrote about the sensitive information in written paragraphs, paraphrased from the documents, months ago, as POLITICO previously reported. Starting in January, he began posting photographs of printouts of the documents, which had been folded and then smoothed out.
The documents contained highly-classified information, including from papers marked “Top Secret,” about the war in Ukraine and other global topics such as China, Iran and the Russian paramilitary group, Wagner.
The Biden administration first began looking into the leak last week, including how the documents first ended up online and how they were able to circulate for months without detection. The Department of Justice is leading the interagency investigation.
