Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Trying to Make the Alleged Pentagon Leaker Into a Martyr

In the fantastical mind of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jack Teixeira—the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who was arrested Thursday for allegedly sharing intelligence documents to an online gaming chat—is not a victim of his own malice or stupidity. Rather, he is yet another “White, male, Christian” being persecuted by the Biden administration. The Republican lawmaker ginned up the narrative shortly after authorities identified Teixeira as the suspect behind a leak of classified materials—which ranged from intelligence on South Korea and Israel, to the Russia-Ukraine war and China-Russia relations—that wound up on a Discord server.

“Jake Teixeira is white, male, Christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime,” tweeted Greene, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee. She then claimed that the real threat to US national security is “the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers.”

The comment was reproved by Representative Eric Swalwell, who accused Greene of siding with “one of the biggest traitors in America’s history.” He also called out House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for not denouncing the leaker and described Greene, who was stripped of her committee assignments in the last congressional session but awarded new ones in January, as McCarthy’s “top lieutenant.” Former GOP congresswoman Liz Cheney tweeted that Greene has made it clear “she cannot be trusted with America’s national security information and should not have a security clearance of any kind.”

Greene’s theory of oppression, in this case, has not been adopted by her Republican colleagues. However, she did find a friend in Tucker Carlson, who shared a similar view during his Thursday night Fox News broadcast. “Tonight, the news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine,” Carlson told his viewers, before lashing out at news outlets for reporting on the reportedly racist and antisemitic content shared in Teixeira’s Discord server. “They are treating him like Osama bin Laden, maybe a little worse actually, because, unlike al-Qaida, apparently, this kid is a racist.”

Like Greene, Carlson cited leaked files on the presence of 14 American troops in Ukraine to claim that Washington has become “a direct combatant in a war against Russia. As we speak, American soldiers are fighting Russian soldiers.” US officials have denied this characterization, according to Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, stating instead that a small detachment of US special forces are stationed at the US embassy in Kyiv and have not seen combat.