A former top aide to the Trump administration criticized Republicans including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene who have defended the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman at the center of allegations about a massive leak of secret information.
(Bloomberg) — A former top aide to the Trump administration criticized Republicans including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene who have defended the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman at the center of allegations about a massive leak of secret information.
“Those on the right who are lauding the leaker as a hero are sorely mistaken,,” Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general and former national security adviser to then-Vice President Mike Pence, wrote in a tweet Friday. “There is nothing honorable about compromising our national security.”
Jack Teixeira made his first appearance Friday in Boston federal court after being arrested for allegedly accessing and disseminating classified national defense information. He faces at least 15 years in prison if convicted.
Kellogg’s comments highlight a split in the Republican Party over how to respond to the security breach. He was an advisor Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and went onto join the administration once Trump became president.
Taylor Greene defended Teixeria on Thursday, writing on Twitter that he “told the truth” and saying he was an enemy to President Joe Biden because he’s “white, male, christian, and antiwar.” The former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., stopped short of praising Teixeira but said the left would treat him differently if Trump were in office.
“Imagine the level of hero Jack Teixeira would be to the media & to the left if he leaked that the Trump Administration was waging an unlawful war against a nuclear super-power without the knowledge of the people or the approval of Congress,” Trump Jr. tweeted Friday.
Former Representative Liz Cheney responded to Taylor Greene on Friday, writing that she “clear yet again that she cannot be trusted with America’s national security information and should not have a security clearance of any kind.”
As for the ex-president, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that the disclosure was “the worst leaks of ‘Intelligence’ in U.S. history.”
“Our Country has never been so embarrassed, and yet they come after ‘Trump’ on their old and tired Boxes Hoax,” Trump wrote in reference to a probe of his own handling of classified information.
The split over the response to the leak mirrors a broader divide in the Republican Party over the direction of US foreign policy. An increasingly vocal minority in the party is skeptical of US assistance to Ukraine in its war with Russia and is calling for a broader retrenchment of US security commitments across the world.
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