The US government investigations into a leak of highly classified Pentagon documents are starting to take shape, with the Pentagon examining how the leak impacts US national security and the Justice Department launching a criminal investigation into who may have been behind the breach.
The interagency probe is being led by the Pentagon’s Office of Intelligence and Security, according to three US officials, and could take months to complete. It will chiefly examine whether any sources and methods have been compromised since the documents, many of which are marked Top Secret, were posted on a social media platform earlier this year.
Milancy Harris, the deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence and security, will be in charge of the effort on the Pentagon side, officials said. The investigation will also try to determine the scope of the leak, since officials do not yet know whether it has been contained or whether there are more classified documents still circulating online.
The Pentagon effort is not focused on the source of the leak, one senior Pentagon official said. But the Defense Department will be examining how it distributes highly classified information and whether it needs to change who receives it on a daily basis.
“Way too many people have access to very sensitive information,” a senior US official told CNN, noting that “thousands” of people likely saw these documents before they hit the internet.
Different batches of documents have appeared online in stages, some posted over a month ago but only coming to light widely late last week. As of now, senior defense officials have little idea who may have been behind the leak. Some have speculated in recent days that it could have been a Pentagon official’s child wanting to show off to his friends on Discord, a social media and gaming platform where the documents first appeared…
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