Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

Massachuset’s Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira and Secretary of Defense Pete
Hegsmeth have little in common. Teixeira is serving a 15-year sentence for leaking Pentagon documents on an unclassified web site called 4chan and on Twitter and Telegram. He then posted printouts of the documents at his parent’s home as well as on an instant messaging platform “Discord.” The leaked documents were primarily related to the Russo-Ukrainian War, containing operational briefs from the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. The operational details would have been extremely valuable to Russian forces for they identified Ukrainian difficulties in countering Russian flanking maneuvers.

Secretary of Defense Hegseth is a former Army National Guard officer who has academic degrees from Princeton University and Harvard University. (Teixeira is a high school graduate.) Hegseth was confirmed by the Senate as the 29th secretary of defense in U.S. history, requiring a tie-breaking vote from Vice President J.D. Vance. It was only the second time in our history that a Cabinet nominee’s confirmation was decided by a vice president’s vote. He is the second-youngest person to serve as secretary of defense, after Donald Rumsfeld, who was the youngest in serving President Gerald Ford and the oldest in serving President George W. Bush. Like Teixeira, however, Hegseth released operational details from the Pentagon’s Joint Staff that identified details of an imminent U.S. military strike against Houthi militants in Yemen. Unlike Teixeira’s information, Hegseth’s operational intelligence could have endangered the lives of naval airmen and compromised the top secret mission.

There is a major difference between the two........

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