US National Guard member held in custody could be a 'scapegoat' in data leak.

Sputnik - The National Guard soldier who was detained for publishing classified US documents could have been framed to be a "scapegoat," Yuri Rogulev, director of the Franklin Roosevelt Foundation for US Studies at Moscow State University, told Sputnik today (14).

 "I got the feeling that they had found a 'scapegoat' and that this 'scapegoat' will now be condemned. There is a possibility that he was framed and used in their favor: where is a 21-year-old National Guard soldier and where are the secret documents at the General Staff and Pentagon level?", Rogulev asks.

 According to him, document leaks happen frequently in the US, for a number of reasons – political, ideological, moral – but in this story one should not draw hasty conclusions, as the story in which a very young military officer gained access to secret documents seems strange.

 "Such a set of published documents could have appeared in a place like the United States National Security Council, which accumulates information from different services. But for the National Guard to obtain information from the CIA or the NSA [National Security Agency] – that's out of the question," the analyst added.

 Previously, US Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed that US Air National Guard soldier Jack Teixeira was detained on Thursday (13) in a case involving the leak of confidential Pentagon data. 

According to the Washington Post, Teixeira found the conflict in Ukraine "depressing" and thought that Moscow and Kiev "must have more in common than what separates them."

 Aleksei Martynov, director of the International Institute of New States, told Sputnik that the leak of classified materials from the Pentagon could be an attempt by the US to divert attention from the investigation by American journalist Seymour Hersh into the Nord Stream explosions.