A former DOJ leak czar talks about the Ukraine document investigation

The Joint Staff Investigation of the Documents and Briefing Documents During the Ukrainian Invasion: A Commentary on the Information Leaked by Secretary of State Relative to the Joint Staff

The diplomats said it was frustrating to see that information public, and that it was harmful to the US reputation.

Some of the documents, which US officials say are authentic, expose the extent of US eavesdropping on key allies, including South Korea, Israel and Ukraine.

The documents show the US concern about the group, which has thousands of personnel operating inUkraine, as well as its plan to strengthen its operations in the country.

The 100-plus pages of slides and briefing documents leave no doubt about how deeply enmeshed the United States is in the day-to-day conduct of the war, providing the precise intelligence and logistics that help explain Ukraine’s success thus far. While President Biden has barred American troops from firing directly on Russian targets, and blocked sending weapons that could reach deep into Russian territory, the documents make clear that a year into the invasion, the United States is heavily entangled in almost everything else.

The Joint Staff, which comprises the Defense Department’s most senior uniformed leadership that advises the president, is examining its distribution lists to look at who gets these reports, a Defense official said. Many of the documents had markings indicating that they had been produced by the Joint Staff’s intelligence arm, known as J2, and appear to be briefing documents.

Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said Friday that the department is continuing to review the matter and had made a referral to the Justice Department, which separately confirmed to CNN that it has launched an investigation into the source of the leak.

The Pentagon and the United States are worried about a potential US spying plan for Russian-Ukraine battle for the Donbas: Battle for a Stalemate

The documents appeared online last month on the social media platform Discord, according to screenshots of the posts reviewed by CNN. The photos of crumpled papers were laid on top of magazines and surrounded by objects, such as zip close bags and Gorilla Glue. A source familiar with these types of documents told CNN that it was as if they had been folded up and put into a pocket.

“We expect the US to share a damage assessment with us in the coming days, but we cannot wait for their assessment. Right now we are doing our own,” said an official from a country that is part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement with the US, which includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

The official pointed out that it was alarming to see one of the documents from February on Russia-Ukraine: Battle for the Donbas region. Heading for a Stalemate. The document notes the challenges with assessing the “endurance of Ukraine’s operations.”

It will be hard to achieve gains for Ukraine, but having the US assessment pointing to a likely yearlong stalemate made no sense, the official said.

One document reveals that the US has been spying on Zelensky. A source who is close to Zelensky said that the leak is unsurprising.

The US could intercept the Russian plan for combat against NATO tanks in Ukrainian beginning in April. A US intelligence report states that the plan called for setting fire zones based on range, with each zone covered by specific weaponry.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/09/politics/pentagon-leaked-documents-us-spying-allies-foes/index.html

The Israel: Pathways to Providing Lethal Aid to Ukraine: Conflict between South Korea and the United States in the Light of the Podolyak Report

Signals intelligence includes intercepted communications and is broadly defined by the National Security Agency as “intelligence derived from electronic signals and systems used by foreign targets, such as communications systems, radars, and weapons systems.”

Relatedly, another intelligence report says that China could use Ukrainian strikes on targets deep inside Russia “as an opportunity to cast NATO as the aggressor, and may increase its aid to Russia if it deems the attacks were significant.”

Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the office of the president, said on his Telegram channel Friday that he thinks the documents that have been disseminated are inauthentic and that they are based on a large.

Yet another document describes, in remarkable detail, a conversation between two senior South Korean national security officials about concerns by the country’s National Security Council over a US request for ammunition.

The officials worried that supplying the ammunition, which the US would then send to Ukraine, would violate South Korea’s policy of not supplying lethal aid to countries at war. One official came up with a way to get around the policy without actually changing it by selling the weapons to Poland.

Several diplomats stated that officials from other countries also plan to raise the issue with Washington but have not yet had a chance to talk about it.

An intelligence report about Israel, meanwhile, has sparked outrage in Jerusalem. The report, produced by the CIA and sourced to signals intelligence, says that Israel’s main intelligence agency, the Mossad, had been encouraging protests against the country’s new government – “including several explicit calls to action,” the report alleges.

The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office criticized the report on its behalf on Sunday, saying it was immoral and without foundation.

Jerusalem will consider providing lethal aid under increased US pressure or a perceived degradation of its relationship with Russia according to a document titled Israel: Pathways to Providing Lethal Aid to Ukraine.

Bulgaria’s willingness to donate its fleet of MiG-29 jets to Ukraine was a “challenge”, the report said, because it will leave Bulgaria without fighter aircraft to fulfill its air policing missions until US-made F-16s are delivered.

Much of the information about Russia was gathered via intercepted communications, raising concerns that the Russians might now change their method of communication to better conceal their planning.

The documents show that the US has been able to intercept Russian targeting plans, down to which exact thermoelectric power plants, electric substations and railroad and vehicle bridges Russian forces planned to attack inside Ukraine and when.

Russian Military Documents have a Heavy Role in Collecting Information about the Operation and the Crimes of Nuclear Proton Experiments

The casualty figures on both sides are notoriously difficult to estimate and the US has been reluctant to share publicly in detail according to the documents.

Russian forces have suffered as many as 223,000 casualties and as much as 43,000 troops killed in action as of February, according to one document. Ukraine, meanwhile, had suffered 124,500 to 131,000 casualties, with up to 17,500 killed in action, the report says.

Analysts say that bad actors are using leaked documents to spread misinformation. The document with casualty numbers, for example, was altered in recent weeks to more than halve the number of Russian deaths, before being spread on pro-Russian Telegram channels.

He said that the level of involvement is rising. “We keep our eye on this process. Well, of course, it makes the whole story more complicated, but it cannot influence the final outcome of the special operation.”

One Western intelligence official said the disclosures were a nightmare. Dmitri Alperovitch, the Russia-born chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, who is best known for pioneering work in cybersecurity, said on Sunday that he feared there were “a number of ways this can be damaging.” He said that included the possibility that Russian intelligence is able to use the pages, spread out over Twitter and Telegram, “to figure out how we are collecting” the plans of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence service, and the movement of military units.

A small number of military documents were found on Telegram on Wednesday, as well as on other sites, and researchers have since discovered more on other sites as early as March 1.

The documents viewed byNPR seem to focus on Ukraine with maps and charts for their troops and weapons, Greg Myre told Morning Edition.

Leaking Edward Snowden’s Papers: The Van Grack Investigation of the December 2016 Ukraine Document Leaked by the LISA Detector

While there’s still a lot we don’t know, former Justice Department “leak czar” Brandon Van Grack says national security damage has certainly been done.

“The only debate now is how much damage there was and the threat is still live,” he says. The priority right now is to find out if the individual still has access to classified information and if there could be more leaks.

Van Grack held multiple national security-focused roles at the Justice Department, including leading the investigation into Edward Snowden after the then-National Security Agency contractor leaked thousands of documents in 2013. One of the sites where the Ukrainian documents were shared was represented by Van Grack as a partner at Morrison & Foerster.

He spoke with Morning Edition’s A Martnez about what is happening behind the scenes as officials try to plug the leak and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

The FBI along with the DOJ is identifying what third parties and companies may have information in their possession and they are issuing search warrants and subpoenas. The leaked documents were being looked at by the intelligence committee and FBI to see if they can identify anyone who had access to them.

You can start with the FBI, DOJ, and all of the reporting of companies and individuals that might have posted this or where it might have been posted. You are working closely with the intelligence community. There are a lot of documents and there are pictures in some of them. I think you are trying to narrow the group of people who might have had access to it.

You’re chewing gum at the same time. Right now the focus needs to be, and is, identifying who this person or these persons are, period. That has to be the priority. As that’s going on, to the extent that they do identify someone, then you’re starting to put together a charging document and figure out that aspect of it. The priority right now is to identify the leak and keep it from coming back.

Even though we don’t know exactly what the overlap is, there should be some overlap of those individuals and expertise. And so certainly there’s at least some subset of those persons who have been sprinting for the last few months on those cases and now would probably need to do some sort of pivot to focus on this for the time being.

This case shows why it’s crucial that we enforce the law that makes it illegal to willfully retain or disclose classified information. There’s millions of Americans that have access to … untold amounts of classified information, and they can’t all be monitored. And the way that you control that access, and ensure that it’s not disclosed to people that don’t have access, is to enforce these laws.