US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Tuesday that the United States will continue to investigate the alleged recent leak of classified documents “until we know its source.”
“We will continue to investigate and turn over every stone until we know the source and extent of this,” Austin said at a press conference at the State Department after a series of meetings with the Secretary of State.
Dozens of classified US documents were recently leaked and published on the Internet, prompting a criminal investigation into a breach that the Pentagon says poses a “serious threat” to national security.
The documents and photos were published on platforms such as “Twitter”, “Telegram”, “Discord” and others, and some of them may have been circulating on the Internet for weeks, if not months, before they attracted media attention last week.
Many of these documents are related to Ukraine, and some of them indicate that the United States is monitoring its allies, while American officials seek to reassure them after the leaks.
Many of these leaks are no longer available on the sites where they were first published, amid reports that Washington is working to delete them.
The repercussions of the leak could be significant and even devastating, as it could jeopardize US intelligence sources and give the country’s adversaries valuable information.