Last week, the mainstream media gleefully reported the arrest of a low-ranking, 21-year-old Air National Guardsman from Massachusetts named Jack Teixeira, who apparently, on an internet chat site, divulged state secrets in violation of the Espionage Act and embarrassed the Biden administration.

A small army of combat-fatigued FBI agents, wearing combat helmets and camos, armed with AR-15s and looking like 82nd Airborne Division wannabes parachuting beyond the lines at Normandy on D-Day, arrested the unarmed 21-year-old Teixeira, at home, alone.

Teixeira has no known record of violence, isn’t a bombmaker or a nightclub shooter, and wasn’t indicted on a violent crime. But they came with enough firepower to storm the beachhead at Iwo Jima, displaying a “look-at-me” swagger, like when they arrested poor old Roger Stone.

The FBI’s made-for-TV heavy-handedness aside, per the indictment, the kid arrested was only 19 years old when Biden’s foolish military decision-makers entrusted him with a TOP SECRET clearance.

As the media droned on over all the damage from Teixeira’s actions, the first question we should ask is how the heck does Biden Pentagon justify giving a TOP SECRET clearance to a 19-year-old kid, who in most states, can’t legally drink a beer?

To be clear, and to understand the significance of this classification, the U.S. military and federal government recognize three basic levels of security clearances: (1) Confidential; (2) Secret, and (3) Top Secret.

While sometimes lower-ranked, younger service members might need or warrant lower-level clearances like “Confidential” and possibly even “Secret,” consider the criteria and consequencess for awarding the highly-sensitive “Top Secret” clearance.

Top Secret clearance holders have access to confidential materials for which “unauthorized disclosure could cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.”

Perhaps such foolishness – like giving a Top Secret clearance to a teenager, where even inadvertent disclosure “could cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security” – is as much an indictment of the Biden administration’s lax combat readiness policies, and distracted obsession with having a woke military, as much as the kid’s actions are on the kid.

Let’s get this straight. Biden’s Pentagon gives a TS clearance to a kid, who can legally drink chocolate milk but not beer, and then gets all worked up when he spills the beans for something he should never have been entrusted with from the beginning?

Sen. Lindsey Graham was so upset about all this - a 19-year-old with a TS clearance, that he called for people to be “fired." Sen. Graham is on the mark here.

What is the Pentagon thinking?

Governmental foolishness abounds in all this: the Pentagon, the FBI’s unnecessary combat patrol made-for-TV display sensationalism, and the kid himself. All foolish.

Except for Tucker Carlson, the mainstream media's reaction, from CNN to MSNBC, the New York Times, and Washington Post, focused on shooting the messenger but ignoring the message. But the message cannot be ignored.

Among the information spilled are revelations of the Biden administration spying on friends and foes alike.

But bigger questions surround this case, hot-potato questions the media won’t touch, with the hottest being this: Do the Teixeira revelations expose a violation of the War Powers Act by Biden? But most disturbing, are claims of United States Special Forces inside the red-hot Ukrainian war zone, months after Biden boasted there will be “no boots on the ground,” a boast perhaps as credible as his blathering that “if you take the vax, you won’t get COVID.” 

If United States Special Forces advisors are on the ground, in the midst of a kinetic war, supporting Ukraine's military against Russia, not only do Americans have a right to know, as major wars have been ignited by the slightest of hair triggers, but a larger question must now be examined: Has Joe Biden violated the War Powers Act?

Section Two of the War Powers Act of 1973 requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of the commission of United States forces into hostilities, or placing forces in a position where hostilities are imminent.

Specifically, the president must notify Congress if America forced are placed:

(1) into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances;

(2) into the territory, airspace, or waters of a foreign nation, while equipped for combat, except for deployments which relate solely to supply, replacement, repair, or training of such forces;

And therein lies the question.

If Biden ordered Special Forces on the ground, in Ukraine, working alongside active-duty Ukrainian forces engaged in battle, has he in effect placed American troops in a situation where those American forces are or will be imminently “involved with hostilities”?  Or what if they are only “assigned to the embassy,” say for “security?”

U.S. Special Forces “guarding” the U.S. Embassy? Really?

Some claim that Special Forces have been dispatched to “provide security” to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. But the notion of Green Berets dispatched to protect a U.S. Embassy, on a long-term basis, is not credible. The United States Marine Corps, not U.S. Special Forces, has handled American embassy security for years. Marines have a school in Quantico to provide special training for embassy security.

Could Green Berets protect the embassy if they wanted to?

Sure. But that’s not their principal mission. That’s the Marine Corps’ mission.

After the Teixeira revelations, the U.S. government appears to have fessed up, at least to the embassy part. 

Per ABC News, reporting on April 12, “A small U.S. military special operations team has been based at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv since early in the war in Ukraine that began in February 2022."  On April 18, the National Security publication Task & Purpose chimed in. “The troops at the embassy provide security for American diplomats on the ground and to make sure the weapons sent by the United States to Ukraine go where they are intended to, a U.S. official told Task & Purpose.” In other words, the Special Operators are really there to funnel U.S. Weapons to Ukrainian troops fighting the Russians.

The “security” ruse is bait-and-switch window dressing to hide behind Biden’s real reason for the Special Operators' presence in the embassy, active participation in the war, by directing the flow of weapons to Ukrainian combatants.

Put another way, Biden seems to be using the U.S. Embassy as an epicenter for weapons running, “to make sure the weapons sent by the United States to Ukraine go where they are intended to.” That’s Biden’s real reason for U.S. Special Forces in the embassy, to be part of the Ukrainian army’s supply line.

Remember how Obama/Hillary/Biden used the American Special Missions Compound in Benghazi for covert gun running from Libya to Syria? Remember Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Ty Woods? It seems like Democrats never learn from their foolish foreign policy mistakes.

50 U.S.C. § 1543 (a)(1) of the War Powers Act does not just require Congressional notification within 48 hours if U.S. troops are directly committed into combat, but “into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.”

The key here, is the phrase “imminent involvement.”

Even if U.S. Special Forces are not out in the field, but are instead inside the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, directing weapons to Ukrainian forces actively engaged in combat against the Russians, they are involved in imminent hostilities by placing American weapons into the hands of live-fire combatants - like an ammunition bearer feeding bullets to a machine gunner on the battlefield.

Not only is this a gross misuse of a United States embassy by Biden, as an embassy is supposed to be a diplomatic center and not an epicenter of active military operations under cover of “providing security,” this also triggers a direct reporting obligation by Biden to Congress under the War Powers Act.

Congress must examine this issue. If Biden has violated the War Powers Act, he must be held accountable.

Either way, he must be held accountable for his real reason for inserting American troops on the ground and/or misusing an American embassy in a hot war against the nation with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

It's time for Congress to consider the messenger’s message, and get to the bottom of the claim about American Special Forces in Ukraine, either on the ground, and/or in the embassy, playing Russian roulette in a foreign war where one foolish slip-up could get millions of Americans killed.

Don Brown, a former U.S. Navy JAG officer, is the author of the book “Travesty of Justice: The Shocking Prosecution of Lieutenant Clint Lorance” and “CALL SIGN EXTORTION 17: The Shootdown of SEAL Team Six,” and the author of 15 books on the United States Military, including three national bestsellers.  He is one of four former JAG officers serving on the Lorance legal team. Lorance was pardoned by President Trump in November 2019.  Brown is also a former military prosecutor, and a former Special Assistant United States Attorney.  He can be reached at donbrownbooks@gmail.com and on Twitter @donbrownbooks.