Questions need to be answered by the Biden administration about how it was possible for Jack Teixeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard to leak highly classified Pentagon documents, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.
The New York Democrat, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, "I have a lot of questions about: Why were these documents lying around? Why did this particular person have access to them? Where was the custody of the documents and who were they for?"
Gillibrand said there is much that must be answered at a Senate briefing this week, telling CNN, "It sounds like [Teixeira] was extremely immature and someone who did not understand the weight and the importance of these documents. And so we need to figure it out and put proper protections in place."
Teixeira, who held top-secret security clearance despite working as a low-ranking information technology official, posted documents online that revealed details on the U.S. intelligence assessment of the ongoing war in Ukraine, as well as widespread American eavesdropping on key allies.
Teixeira was arrested and federally charged last week, with President Joe Biden saying Friday that he had ordered the military and intelligence community to "take steps to further secure and limit distribution of sensitive information."
In addition to the Biden administration's efforts to understand the extent of the problem the leaks exposed and to prevent further occurrences, Congress has said it will probe the incident to discover why the intelligence community failed to discover its secrets were on a public internet forum for weeks.
"We need to know the facts," Gillibrand said. "We need to know who this airman was, why he felt he had the authority or ability to show off confidential documents, secret documents to his friends."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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