Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said Sunday she has “a lot of questions” for the Biden administration about the circumstances around the leak of highly classified Pentagon documents.
“I have a lot of questions about: Why were these documents lying around? Why did this particular person have access to them? Where was the custody of the documents and who were they for?” Gillibrand said in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
The Biden administration spent much of the past week scrambling to rectify damages after Jack Teixeira, an airman with the Massachusetts Air National Guard who held top-secret security clearance, posted documents online that revealed blunt details on the US intelligence assessment of the war in Ukraine as well as the extent of US eavesdropping on key allies.
Teixeira, who worked as a low-ranking IT official, was arrested and federally charged last week for facilitating the leak. He allegedly began posting information about the documents online around December and photos of the documents in January, court records show.
Gillibrand, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, sidestepped criticizing the military’s vetting process for security clearances but said questions needed to be answered at a Senate briefing this week.
“It sounds like he was extremely immature and someone who did not understand the weight and the importance of these documents. And so we need to figure it out and put proper protections in place,” she said.
The Pentagon breach has left looming questions about national security implications. In a statement acknowledging the extent of the problem the leaks exposed, President Joe Biden said Friday that he had directed both the military and intelligence community to “take steps to further secure and limit distribution of sensitive…
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