Rep. Turner to Biden: Allies Concerned About Leaks

President Joe Biden may be indicating that he’s not concerned about the content of a trove of intelligence documents that were leaked, allegedly by a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, but Rep. Mike Turner said the matter is an issue of serious international concern.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “certainly would be concerned and so would our other allies,” the Ohio Republican said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” “Whenever we’re trusted with information, we’re working in partnership with someone, you know, our intelligence gathering, our intelligence information if it is released can represent a vulnerability to them.”

Some of the documents would have in the form of management items, Turner added, showing a “to-do” list concerning depleting inventories for Ukraine and what the United States and other allies must do to help them be replenished.

“It doesn’t indicate that they have no other sources and that in fact, they will both run out and be completely open and vulnerable to Russia,” Turner said.

Meanwhile, if one looks at the complaint filed against the accused leaker, Jack Teixeira, it shows that not only did he have access to documents when he shouldn’t have been able to obtain them, but “someone should have been paying attention, tapping him on the shoulder, and ending that access.”

There were also “signals” that Teixeira, given his online activities, “might be a likely leaker of information in the future,” and access he had to information should have been cut off,” said Turner. “He should never have been having access to this level of classified information that could hurt the United States.”

Teixeira was working in tech support, so there was “no need to know for him of the information that he was accessing,” Turner added.

There will be congressional hearings on the matter, the congressman said, adding that lessons from the 9/11 Commission could come into play.

“We learned that we needed to more widely disseminate classified information so that people had actionable intelligence that they could piece together puzzles,” said Turner. “We’ve gone too far in where we have an instance where someone in Massachusetts who’s looking at documents with respect to war plans in Ukraine, and the Department of Defense knows.”

Turner also rejected claims by some conservatives defending Teixeira’s alleged activities by saying his actions exposed President Joe Biden’s actions, particularly with Ukraine.

“There are no U.S. troops on the ground in Ukraine, other than the troops that are normally at an embassy, protecting the embassy,” said Turner, pushing back against information in some documents. “If he’s found guilty, it will be of espionage, it’s of being a traitor to your country. That’s not someone to look up to. That is someone who has compromised his country and has certainly compromised our allies. That’s not the oath that he took. That’s not the job that he took.”

Turner, as a member of the congressional “Gang of Eight,” also discussed documents found at the homes of former President Donald Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, and Biden, saying many questions are remaining about those items as the Department of Justice “has not been forthcoming.”

“They’ve been somewhat disingenuous and certainly both the House and the Senate are going to have to address this,” he said. “The documents that were delivered to Congress are not complete and they don’t identify whose documents they were, whether they came from the trove of Biden’s behind the Corvette, or whether they came from Mar-a-Lago.”