Jack Teixeira, the suspected leaker of US military documents, has been charged and detained pending trial by a Boston court. On the social media platform Discord, the classified files were initially posted in a small private chat group dubbed “Bear vs. Pig” and “Thug Shaker Central” Both were invitation-only, with approximately twenty members in each group. The FBI claims in court files that Teixeira posted classified information online in December 2022 as paragraphs of text and in January 2023 as photographs of documents.
Members of “Thug Shaker Central” first met in a Discord group for fans of a YouTuber who uploads videos about firearms and military equipment. During the Covid lockdowns, they formed their own private group, with Mr. Teixeira at the helm of this new tight-knit community. In addition to Americans, the group included people from Ukraine, Russia, South America, and other countries. For a few months, this group had exclusive access to the classified documents.
Public dissemination of the documents
Early in March, a user with the alias “Lucca” uploaded some of the documents to the “wow_mao” public channel on Discord. This user also belonged to the Thug Shaker Central community. Teixeira swiftly purged Thug Shaker Central and its subgroup, Bear vs. Pig, after this public sharing of the documents. On 5 April, the files were posted to the message board 4chan, after which they began to appear on pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and were taken up by prominent military bloggers.
vanishing documents
Multiple screenshots of the documents continue to circulate on Twitter, Telegram, and Reddit, but the originals are significantly more difficult to locate. A significant number of the original copies have vanished from the chats where they first surfaced. Others who shared the screenshots on Discord, Telegram, and Twitter have either removed their feeds or completely deleted their social media profiles. In Ukraine, too, the documents’ veracity has been questioned, with some commentators alleging Russia of planting forgeries in advance of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Russian reaction
Initially, pro-Kremlin Telegram channels that disseminated the screenshots focused primarily on their content rather than the documents’ veracity. Soon, prominent channels and media entities began to portray the documents as at least partially fabricated. An expert cited by the ultranationalist news website Regnum suggested that the documents may have been intentionally leaked to create a pretext for the forthcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive. Olga Skabeyeva, host of 60 Minutes on state-run Rossiya 1 TV, stated that the West had “done everything possible to create the image of a weak Ukraine whose shells are running out and which has nothing left.”
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