We’re a couple of weeks removed from learning about the massive intelligence leak on Discord, where Jack Teixeira dumped classified information into gaming servers for his friends to see just how much access he had to things they didn’t.
The fallout from that story continues, and we know that Teixeira had access to information that perhaps he shouldn’t have, and was leaking it a lot longer than we knew, which means that the ball was dropped somewhere along the way. But the rot in this case, like so many others, extends all the way to the top.
According to the Washington Post, the White House is being accused of not alerting nations like Ukraine that sensitive intelligence from and regarding them was leaked.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has not had any conversations with the White House about a massive leak of top-secret U.S. intelligence documents, he said in a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post on Monday, calling the disclosures damaging to both Washington and Kyiv.
Zelensky learned about the disclosures like everybody else — in the news.
“I did not receive information from the White House or the Pentagon beforehand,” Zelensky said. “We did not have that information. I personally did not. It’s definitely a bad story.”
“It is unprofitable for us,” Zelensky added. “It is not beneficial to the reputation of the White House, and I believe it is not beneficial to the reputation of the United States.”
Should we be surprised? The Biden Administration is not known for admitting its mistakes and actively waves them away when it can’t obscure the truth enough. That appears to be the case here. We don’t know when the government became aware of the leaks, but we do know it was sometime before the news of those leaks broke.
If our government is so dead-set on supporting Ukraine (which, in ways that don’t include a blank check, we should), then being transparent in something like a major intelligence leak involving them should be something that’s communicated. That it wasn’t is yet another foreign policy failure on top of the ones the Biden administration is already responsible for.