The man who may have been leaking top-secret Pentagon documents was a fit and armed military dude who controlled a group of young gamers united by their worship of guns and God: WaPo
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The Washington Post followed the leak of the Pentagon Papers to a man named OG on Discord.
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He was the leader of a group of young gamers who loved guns, military gear and God, according to the outlet.
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OG said he worked at a military base and sent hundreds of secrets via WaPo to his gamer friends.
The Washington Post has traced the recent Pentagon intelligence leak to a man who shared hundreds of secret files with a small group of young gamers on a private Discord server.
The unnamed man, nicknamed OG by the other server members, said he works at a military base and claimed to know high-level government secrets that were kept from the public, two unnamed group members told The Post.
Your invite-only server on Discord — a messaging and voice chat platform for gamers — had around two dozen male members worldwide who shared a passion for guns, military equipment and God, The Post reported.
Back in 2020, OG began sending the classified information to its Discord server, once called “Thug Shaker Central,” according to The Post.
OG, the server’s administrator, expected members of the group to pay close attention to the information overload he was feeding them, one of the two young Discord users told The Post.
“He’s fit. He is strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Pretty much everything you could want from a crazy movie,” the member said.
But at the time, OG was only sharing its own rewritten transcripts of the documents and hand-typing them with annotations, one of the Discord members told The Post. The transcripts were extensive and included information such as the locations of top politicians and military secrets, the outlet reported.
Then, in late 2022, OG got mad at players for not paying attention to the secrets he was sharing and instead began sending photos of actual documents to The Post. Furniture and household items like Gorilla Glue and nail clippers can be seen in some of his pictures, offering potential leads that could help authorities track him, the Post reported.
The Post reviewed around 300 photos of classified documents, some of which have yet to be released. An estimated 100 secret service files have been found on the internet so far.
Dozens of sensitive documents from OG Discord server “Thug Shaker Central” eventually surfaced on Russian Telegram channels and 4Chan forums in late March and early April. when authorities first became aware of the leak.
The photos had previously been circulating on multiple Discord servers, finding their way from Thug Shaker Central to another server founded by YouTuber Wow_Mao in March. That reports Bellingcat analyst Aric Toler.
And at least 10 documents were later sent to another Discord server dedicated to the video game Minecraft, Toler reported. There, according to Toler, the files gained greater attention.
After The New York Times Reporting on the leak on April 1, OG urged everyone at Thug Shaker Central to delete messages he had sent them as well as the classified information he had shared, according to The Post.
“He said something happened and he prayed to God that his event wouldn’t happen,” one of the young Discord members told the Post.
The members of his group were “sobbing and crying to the core” as if they were “losing a family member,” the Discord member said, per The Post.
The Thug Shaker Central server has been deleted, Bellingcat reported.
US officials are still trying to determine the impact of the leak and to determine exactly how many documents were exposed.
In a previous statement to Insider, a Discord spokesperson said the platform “is cooperating with law enforcement,” but couldn’t comment on an active investigation.
Discord and Pentagon officials did not immediately respond to Insider requests for comment on this story, which were broadcast outside of regular business hours.
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