WASHINGTON (AP) — A major leak of classified U.S. documents that’s shaken Washington and exposed new details of its intelligence gathering may have started in a chatroom on a social media platform popular with gamers.
Held on the Discord platform, which hosts real-time voice, video and text chats, a discussion originally created to talk about a range of topics turned to the war in Ukraine. As part of debates about Ukraine, according to one member of the chat, an unidentified poster shared documents that were allegedly classified, first typing them out with the poster’s own thoughts, then, as of a few months ago, beginning to post images of papers with folds in them.
The posts appear to have gone unnoticed outside of the chat until a few weeks ago, when they began to circulate more widely on social media and get picked up by major news outlets. The leaks have alarmed U.S. officials and sparked a Justice Department investigation.
The records have provided startling and surprisingly timely details of U.S. and NATO assistance to Ukraine. They also provided clues about efforts to assist Ukraine in its war with Russia, including an anticipated spring offensive.
The scale of the exposure has yet to be determined. Also unclear is whether any government worked to share the documents or manipulate them.