attorney general merrick garland identified him as 21-year-old air national guardsman, jack tech t teixeira the new york times spoke with members of the private group teixeira oversaw the chat where 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games. it is in that group that airman teixeira is said to have uploaded hundreds of pages of intelligence briefings, according to the times joining me now is justice correspondent, ken dilanian. the details are unbelievable in this case. walk us through what we know one more time, what is out there and how we think it got out there. what is out there, alex, are some highly classified documents showing the fruits of american eavesdropping, signals intelligence on russia and many other countries. very embarrassing revelations that the u.s. has supplied on allies not surprising to the allies, but embarrassing when it becomes public, ukraine s air defenses and w
people will always do stupid things for money, you know, for any number of motives, ideological motives. in this case, if the washington post reporting is to be believed, he was trying to impress a bunch of people in a chat room. your second question is the key one for me as an overseer of the intelligence community which is how in the world, first of all, did he have access to this information, it s not clear to ne sitting in massachusetts he net necessarily needed to know what was happening on the battlefield in ukraine, we don t know the facts, but if he was able to print stuff out, take photographs of it, that is things we can fix. you know, it s not just from my stand standpoint, it s not just what happened on the ukrainian battlefield, it s our allies we rely on relationships of trust with our allies. the five i s in particular, but all of our allies. if you re an ally, you re thinking i wonder if the united states can keep the secret safe. given for position as ranking membe
possibility of that type of information being stolen and seeing exactly what you had happen here occur. so with the opm hacks and the other ones, t difficult to go through them because they re coming from china or others. so a lot of the times it s difficult to find the folks let alone go after them from a legal stand standpoint. it s just the waive of the future. okay. so is this the end of the website business, joey? well, it maybe and here is why i say that. now you know the lawsuits are coming and there are two critical questions. will the lawsuits come and how many. there s a certain admission that comes with that. you can file under seal. that s number one. you can ask the government to
now, i don t think i m going to bridge too far. this is serious stuff from the stand standpoint of the secrecy. there s no difference between cooking the books on intelligence to go to war or cooking the booing books and keeping trade negotiations secret and we have to rely on wikileaks instead of the white house to find out what the heck is going on when it comes to american jobs. or maybe that doesn t matter. joining me tonight, lisa johnson, head of the investment law and policy at the columbia center of sustainable investment. and genevieve woods, senior contributor with the daily signal with us tonight. genevieve, how do you defend the secrecy here? your thoughts? well i think this is a trade agreement. there are trade agreements that will eventually come before the congress. respectfully, if you re not going to defend the secrecy, then what would you say about it? what i think we re talking about here is something in most
we don t want to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage or something will give at the supreme court level and the supreme court will have to issue a ruling that finally says in all 50 states these are the rules. it feels to me like we re fast approaching the point where something will give on this in a big way. well, yeah. what we have seen this year is certainly we hit a tipping point. we hit a tipping point decades in the making. we more than doubled the number of states where we have marriage equality in just one year. that s huge. that s huge and we also have seen the public opinion kind of go off the charts now. more than 50% of the public believes that marriage equality should just be the law of the land and it is not really that big of a deal. i think that what we have seen in utah is really what we re going to continue to see around the country, courts are coming in and saying this is a constitutional issue here. you cannot treat some couples differently than you treat ot