Yesterday, reporting on the document leaks that emerged at the end of last week began to shift from content to efforts at damage control. “Senior U.S. officials are racing to placate frustrated and confused allies from Europe to the Middle East to Kyiv following the leak of highly classified information about the war in Ukraine and other global issues,” Politico reported yesterday. “After the news of the leak broke last week, senior intelligence, State Department and Pentagon officials reached out to their counterparts to quell worries about the publishing of the intel, according to four officials — an American, two European and one Five Eyes member — familiar with those conversations.”
“Meanwhile, officials in London, Brussels, Berlin, Dubai and Kyiv questioned Washington about how the information ended up online, who was responsible for the leak and what the U.S. was doing to ensure the information was removed from social media,” the Politico report continued. It goes on to say that the leak saga has left “the U.S. relationship with its allies in a state of crisis.”
John Kirby told reporters at the White House yesterday that the administration still doesn’t know whether or not the leak is contained. “We don’t know. We truly don’t,” he said when asked whether there was an ongoing threat. “We know that some of [the documents] have been doctored,” Kirby added (this claim is still based on the casualty figures reported in one document, because they differ from what US officials have said publicly—ed.), but he noted that officials were “still working through the validity of all the documents that we know are out there.”
