Grab a coffee.

The man behind a massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies, revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic.

United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read the long note, one of the members explained. But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people.

The young member read OG’s message closely, and the hundreds more that he said followed on a regular basis for months. They were, he recalled, what appeared to be near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents that OG indicated he had brought home from his job on a “military base,” which the member declined to identify. OG claimed he spent at least some of his day inside a secure facility that prohibited cellphones and other electronic devices, which could be used to document the secret information housed on government computer networks or spooling out from printers. He annotated some of the hand-typed documents, the member said, translating arcane intel-speak for the uninitiated, such as explaining that “NOFORN” meant the information in the document was so sensitive it must not be shared with foreign nationals.

OG told the group he toiled for hours writing up the classified documents to share with his companions in the Discord server he controlled. The gathering spot had been a pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends. The members swapped memes, offensive jokes and idle chitchat. They watched movies together, joked around and prayed. But OG also lectured them about world affairs and secretive government operations. He wanted to “keep us in the loop,” the member said, and seemed to think that his insider knowledge would offer the others protection from the troubled world around them.

“He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind,” the member said.

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Daily Mail;

A second batch of classified documents detailing the United States’ analyses of global hotspots has been leaked online in a suspected Russian plot.

More than 100 documents are feared to have been obtained in what a senior intelligence called ‘a nightmare for the Five Eyes,’ – a reference to the intelligence sharing agreement between the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

The documents cover the war in Ukraine, China, terrorism and the Middle East.

The Pentagon confirmed the leak, but said that some of the documents – as with the earlier reported leak – had been doctored to downplay the strength of U.S. allies.

The first tranche of documents appeared to have been posted in early March on the social media platform Discord, according to Aric Toler, an analyst at Bellingcat, the Dutch investigative site.

Friday’s documents were published on the controversial message board 4Chan, and subsequently spread on Twitter.

Oh dear. The earliest versions of the unedited leak I can find — on 4chan, of all places — also has an additional map of the situation in Bakhmut that isn’t in the copies being spread on Russian TG channels.The guy was posting these docs to win an argument against other anons on 4chan