The U.S. Intelligence Community has “grown out of control” and must be reigned in, according to former National Security Council (NSC) chief of staff and CIA official Fred Fleitz, who claimed recently that leaked information suggests the Biden administration “was misleading the American people on a variety of accounts.”
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News Monday, America First Policy Institute for American Security Vice Chair Fred Fleitz, who served as deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, discussed the actions of alleged Pentagon leaker Jack Teixeira.
Asked about the fact that a 21-year-old Airman First Class, the third lowest enlisted rank in the Air Force, who enlisted in 2019 and was serving as a “cyber transport systems journeyman” — essentially an IT technician — managed to access top secret military data, Fleitz argued that “it [actually] does add up.”
“From what I’ve read, this guy had access to something called the Joint Chiefs of Staff J2 intelligence daily, and about 5,000 people have access to that,” he said. “He also apparently had access to something called Intellipedia — a classified Wikipedia.”
“Now, if he had access to that, he also had access to something called Intellink — a classified Internet,” he added. “There are thousands of classified websites on Intellink and he would have been able to access the J2 intelligence update; Intellipedia and many other classified documents if he had access to this.”
Fleitz explains how such a system reflects several problems, including the fact that “too many people in the U.S. government have access to very sensitive intelligence that they don’t have a need to know, and that has to be addressed.”
In addition, with electronic dissemination, “huge numbers of people can access all kinds of stuff that they could not have accessed before, and it’s created a real security problem.”
Another problem he cites is that the Intelligence Community “has grown out of control.”
Related: Top House Intel. Dem: Biden Admin. Is Too Casual on Alleged Classified Doc Leak
“There are now 18 intelligence agencies, each one of them fighting for more personnel, and when they hire more people, they demand access,” he said.
“We have so many people — so much duplication — who have clearances for matters they don’t have a need to know,” he added.
As such, he suggests, much work is needed to “get control of clearances and to get control of the out-of-control growth of our intelligence agencies.”
However, according to Fleitz, the leak is “not as bad as people think.”
“The Snowden leaks were much worse,” he said. “It’s bad. It’s embarrassing. It reveals information that the U.S. government knew about other countries that we didn’t want them to know and, frankly, this material in these leaks, I don’t think the Biden administration wanted the American people to know.”
“But I think that the Biden administration and Congress are going to have to work together to come up with some really aggressive ways to restrict access to this material to the people who need it,” he added.
He slammed the fact that a National Guardsman had access to all this information and that a mere technician working in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) could “pull off” removing it from the site.
“Now I know he was on detail at Fort Bragg doing computer tech stuff, but apparently there was no auditing; there was no record of him opening the same classified documents every day and printing documents that he had no need to know,” he said.
“There should have been some type of a safeguard that would have detected that this low-level person was routinely accessing sensitive information that he did not have a need to know,” he added.
Fleitz cited two additional lessons from the incident.
Firstly, the U.S. government “has to do a much better job at vetting people who have access to sensitive information.”
“There has to be a much better campaign to remind and educate them that they have to keep their word to protect this material,” he said.
Related: Dem Rep. Spanberger on Biden Downplaying Leak: Any Leak Is ‘Completely’ Bad
In addition, he argued, intelligence agencies need “better” investigations, including investigations of unauthorized access and of legitimate leaks, “and really tough investigations of re-upping clearances.”
“I think we’ve really fallen behind the eight ball on that,” he said. “We have to do a much better job.”
Noting that the FBI was likely “already monitoring him and had decided not to move in on him” at the time the media broke the story, Fleitz expressed concern over the fact the FBI “did not arrest him right away.”
“I guess they were waiting for him to do something, but it worries me that if you don’t move in on something like this quickly, they might get away,” he said.
On the Biden administration’s downplaying events, Fleitz said it was “sadly, a typical response from Biden, and I don’t think he knows what’s going on.”
Yet, he noted, “it does appear that some of this information suggests that the Biden administration was misleading the American people on a variety of accounts.”
“That the Ukrainian army is doing much worse than known; they don’t have enough missiles to get through the next few months,” he said, “and that Taiwan is much more vulnerable than what is generally known; that it could be very vulnerable to missiles fired from China.”
While that “doesn’t justify the leak” because “the ends don’t justify the means,” Fleitz said the information would “need to be explained” and Congress “will have to act on that, too.”
“If that material wasn’t briefed to Congress, and I hope that it was, it is going to have to relay all that to the administration because the Biden administration is supposed to share information with Congress,” he said.
“Congress is supposed to be kept currently and fully informed about intelligence matters and these are matters I hope Congress is well aware of,” he added.
Fleitz called the recent leak of Chinese spy balloons traversing the skies of America a “good example” of the issue.
Related: GOP Rep. Steube: We Need to Investigate Biden ‘Lying’ about Spy Balloon
“It appears there are more spy balloons the administration lied to the American people about and this intelligence reveals that, though it doesn’t justify what this person did,” he said.
If Teixeira “was a whistleblower, which he clearly wasn’t,” Fleitz suggested, “there are channels you can go through to report information like this, such as going to the intelligence oversight committees or into a SCIF to tell a member of Congress or a congressional staff member what you know and then leave.”
“Leaking classified information to the media because you object to something going on in the government — that’s never the way to go because of the [massive] damage you could do to national security,” he concluded.
The matter comes after FBI agents arrested on Thursday 21-year-old Massachusetts resident Jack Douglas Teixeira, who is accused of leaking over a hundred purportedly classified documents, many of them pertaining to the Ukraine war.
According to reports, he frequently presented these documents as evidence that every government involved in the conflict is lying to its citizens about the progress of the war.
He also allegedly posted materials related to other news stories, including foreign interference in U.S. elections, U.S. interference in foreign governments, and how intelligence officials were aware of as many as four other Chinese spy balloons aside from the one reported earlier this year.
Follow Joshua Klein on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
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