Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department analyst working for the RAND Corporation, had given the two newspapers top-secret documents. They showed not only that the US was losing the war in Vietnam but that the Pentagon had known the US couldn’t win the war for many years and kept fighting it anyway.
The Pentagon had tried to prevent the publication of the documents, but the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protected newspapers’ right to publish them, even though Ellsberg had broken the law by leaking them.
Thanks to the Twitter Files, we learned that individuals with links to US military and intelligence organizations have tried for years to convince reporters that they should no longer follow the Pentagon Papers principle, ostensibly since doing so could help foreign adversaries. They used this argument at the same moment that they were attempting to “pre-bunk” the Hunter Biden laptop, months before The New York Post published articles about its existence.
Now, a judge in Tennesse may violate the Supreme Court’s famous Pentagon Papers ruling and order a reporter in Nashville named @michaelpleahy to reveal the source of documents leaked to him. The leaked documents in question came from a trans-identified woman named Audrey Hale, who killed six people at a Christian school last year.