We begin with a stunning break in the investigation into the highest-profile US intelligence leak in years. The disclosure of Pentagon secrets about the war in Ukraine has reverberated across the world and caused international scandal. Under arrest tonight, a twenty-one-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman named J.T and there are still so many questions. How did he have access to these top-secret documents? And what prompted him to allegedly post military documents in his obscure online chat group with teenagers?

Our Boston station WBZ was there, capturing his arrest live, showing heavily armed federal officers taking the suspect into custody just this afternoon outside his mom’s home, about an hour south of Boston. Well, tonight, we’re also learning that journalists from New York Times had identified the alleged leaker from what called “a digital trail of evidence” including a granite countertop. The journalists were knocking on his door just moments before the FBI showed up.

The FBI has arrested the prime suspect, and just moments ago, the Secretary of Defense ordered an investigation into how the Pentagon handles its classified documents, some of which circulated for months in a chat group used by video gamers, some of them teenagers. The FBI put on a show of force to arrest twenty-one-year-old airman in the Massachusetts National Guard. He came out with his hands up in front of his childhood home in south Boston. Attorney General M.G announced the arrest. It came one week after the Pentagon first discovered some of its most highly classified documents posted on social media. Although the leak started last fall when secrets started showing up on a gaming platform called Discord. The Washington Post interviewed a teenage member of a small chat group on Discord who said the leaks began with text messages quoting from classified documents and then, when no one seemed impressed, photographs of the actual documents. Glimpses of what lay beneath the documents, a countertop and a kitchen floor matched photos of the inside T’s home, a digital trail which led the New York Times there ahead of the FBI.