Once upon a time, Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told President Trump, and not benevolently, that if he attempted to rein in the U.S. intelligence community, they had "six ways to Sunday at getting back at you..."

Trump is not around now, so the intelligence guys seem to be doing that to themselves.

According to the New York Times:

NORTH DIGHTON, Mass. — The F.B.I. arrested a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard on Thursday in connection with the leak of dozens of highly classified documents containing an array of national security secrets, including the breadth of surveillance the United States is able to conduct on Russia.

Airman First Class Jack Douglas Teixeira was taken into custody to face charges of leaking classified documents after federal authorities said he had posted batches of sensitive intelligence to an online gaming chat group, called Thug Shaker Central.

What a lovely picture that is, assuming he's the guy who did it. The U.S. spends untold billions on the gathering and analyzing of information to create state secrets so that U.S. leaders in critical times can have exactly the right information they need to make decisions. They do so at great cost, but also at great risk, enticing foreign nationals to endanger their lives to help us, and out in the field, taking great risks themselves.

All it takes is one low level government employee or member of the military to spill those secrets, supposedly because he wants to impress all his little friends in his internet social group. That's what's important to him. In some cases, it's not even for money, just a desperate quest for love, approval and prestige in the gang.

But it shouldn't be surprising. Coming from a society where the word 'patriot' is grounds for an IRS audit, protest is 'patriotic,' dissent is duty, the U.S. is held up to world scorn in the United Nations by its own ambassador and secretary of state, loyality is laughed at, honor is scoffed at, 'ban the box' is de rigueur for federal hiring, and school kids are taught to salute the gay rainbow flag instead of the American flag, who was taken aback to see this costly garbage happen? There are many of these people -- from Private Bradley Manning, to CIA contractor Edward Snowden, to chief Wikileaker Julian Assange (an Australian, but still part of the West), to military translator Reality Winner, to assorted characters in the U.S. Senate intelligence committee, they all either escaped or got off with slaps on the wrist. Gone are the days when they were called 'traitors' and sentenced to long, forbidding, prison terms.  

Once there's a security breach, spies are endangered, troops are endangered, and intelligence officers are endangered, based on this absence of the patriotism ethos, while anything goes as far as who gets hired to safeguard the secrets, the crazier the better. All we have to do is look at the sorry case of Sam Brinton, the Biden administration's top nuclear waste official whose side gig was stealing women's suitcases at airports to wear their clothing, or the "pup play" bestiality and sado-masochism enthusiasts caught in military leadership positions in Hawaii, posing in dog masks in their uniforms for their social media followers.

What's the point of having secrets if nobody has loyalty to the U.S. and there's always somebody who can't be trusted to keep these secrets? Why not let it all hang out, the way Sam Brinton once did?

New York Post columnist Douglas Murray makes the important point that the U.S. seems to be the only nation producing these kinds of people.

Think back over the past thirteen years ago and try to think which other country has had more of its secrets leaked out than this one.

Has there yet been a time when swathes of secrets from America’s rivals and enemies have been exposed for the world to see?  

Has there been a Wikileaks from the Chinese Communist Party?  

Have we seen vast caches of secrets from the Kremlin?  No, and no again.

Turn to America´s friends and allies.  Have the UK, Canada, Australia or New Zealand been responsible for the largest classified data breaches in recent history?  

Again, no.  That singular distinction goes to this country.  And it is a distinction which the US intelligence community should once again explain, but will fail to.

They don't teach values in schools. They hold our country up to scorn as hopelessly racist and fatally flawed. They don't vet with any standards when they hire -- and they hire a lot of them. They don't compartmentalize when they amass secrets, which are too many anyway. They can't be surprised that they've got another one on their hands, a leaker who leaks it all out for our enemies to read.

Several observers of the intelligence community have pointed out other self-destructive issues within this sorry drama:

Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi noted that the concept of having national secrets is undercut severely based on who gets sanctioned for leaking those secrets -- the entire system is undermined by the casual leaks and security breaches of the powerful who go unsanctioned for their leaks and breaches. 

Remember James Comey? Remember Joe Biden's garage?

The intelligence community has itself been massively interfering in domestic news using illegal leaks for years. Remember the “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” story by David Ignatius of the Washington Post in January of 2017, outing would-be Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn as having been captured in intercepts speaking with a Russian ambassador? That was just the first in a string of leak- or intercept-based news stories that dominated news cycles in the Trump years, involving everything from conclusions of the FISA court to supposedly secret meetings in the Seychelles.

When civilians or whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange (in jail for an incredible four years now), Reality Winner and now the “Discord Leaker” bring leaked information to the public, the immediate threat is Espionage Act charges and decades of jail time. When a CIA head or a top FBI official does it, it’s just news. In fact, officials talk openly about using “strategic leaks” as a P.R. staple. In a world where media currency is becoming the ultimate power, these people want a monopoly. It’s infuriating.

Former FBI agent Mark Wauck points to a media item featuring Andrew Napolitano interviewing Larry Johnson with the latter suggesting that maybe Teixeira wasn't the leaker and the government itself set him up in some kind of false flag operation, given that the CIA and other documents supposedly recovered was intelligence that Teixeira couldn't have had access to.

One possibility they didn't consider in thosee observations is that maybe there were multiple leakers, each trying to impress and one-up the others in the internet group by who could leak the hardest.

Investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald also has fascinating observations, pointing out that the FBI has gotten apparently so flabby the newspaper reporters are getting ahead of them in revealing who the leaker was. Or, that there was a cozy relationship.

All of these things -- and there are more -- suggest an intelligence community that can't keep secrets and therefore is imploding. It's significant that they can't blame President Trump for this, they can only blame themselves and their leftist political allies for this sad state of affairs. While our enemies in China and elsewhere beef up their intelligence capabilities, while Joe Biden only beefs up the agencies' money, not their performance, premised on loyalty to the U.S. Loyalty is for the birds. No wonder these scandals keep happening and happening. If there are any secrets left from this, they won't be, as John LeCarre used to write, worth the candle.

Image: Nick Youngson, via Pix4Free, CC BY-SA 3.0