Classified ‘Discord Files’ Leaker Is Gun-Loving Discord Leader Who Shared Documents With Minors, Per Report

The Washington Post released a bombshell report detailing the man responsible for leaking highly-classified Pentagon documents.

The release of the documents sparked a flurry of public concerns since they not only revealed the U.S. government’s assessments of the war in Ukraine but they also revealed how U.S. intelligence-gathering operations keep tabs on the intelligence services of friendly and adversarial nations. The Post’s report delves into the online history of “O.G.,” the initials of a “young, charismatic gun enthusiast” who shared these classified documents with an online community of acquaintances, several of whom were minors.

The leak took place on a Discord server led by O.G., where members bonded over movies, offensive jokes, talking about military hardware, and video game tactics. The Post interviewed a server member who was a young teenager when he met O.G., and he told the paper that O.G. would lecture them about world affairs and government operations to “keep us in the loop.”

From the report:

Late last year, a peeved OG fired off a message to all the members of the server. He had spent nearly an hour every day writing up “these long and drawn-out posts in which he’d often add annotations and explanations for stuff that we normal citizens would not understand,” the member said. His would-be pupils were more interested in YouTube videos about battle gear.

“He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them.”

That’s when OG changed tactics. Rather than spend his time copying documents by keyboard, he took photographs of the genuine articles and dropped them in the server. These were more vivid and arresting documents than the plain text renderings. Some featured detailed charts of battlefield conditions in Ukraine and highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian electrical facilities. Others sketched the potential trajectory of North Korean ballistic nuclear missiles that could reach the United States. Another featured photographs of the Chinese spy balloon that floated across the country in February, snapped from eye-level, probably by a U-2 spy plane, along with a diagram of the balloon and the surveillance technology attached to it.

The young man who spoke with the Post revered O.G. as similar to an uncle or a father figure, and was astonished by his level of insight into current events.

“I was one of the very few people in the server that was able to understand that these [documents] were legitimate,” he said. “I felt like I was above everyone else to some degree and that…I knew stuff that they didn’t.”

O.G. was said to be in his early to mid-20s, worked on a military base, and he claimed that his job took him to secure facilities where cell phones weren’t allowed. The young man who spoke with the Post identified O.G. in a video that the paper reviewed, where O.G. “[stood] at a shooting range, wearing safety glasses and ear coverings and holding a large rifle. He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target.”

The report also dove into the more unsettling side of O.G.’s views:

But OG had a dark view of the government. The young member said he spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.”

OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The attack left 10 dead, all of them Black, and wounded three more. OG said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption.