A 22-year-old US Army soldier in Texas was arrested Wednesday and charged with attempting to send sensitive information about US battle tanks to Russia, the Justice Department said in a news release.
Federal prosecutors allege that Taylor Adam Lee, who is an active-duty service member stationed at Fort Bliss and possesses a very high, top-secret clearance, offered assistance to Russia and sent technical information about the M1A2 Abrams tank online in June.
Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, said in a statement Wednesday that Lee provided the information to the individual he believed worked for Russian intelligence in exchange for Russian citizenship.
The really stupid thing about this is that I seriously doubt that there’s anything significant that Russia wants and doesn’t have on the M1A2 in 2025. I mean, the tanks are all over the place. ISIL captured some. Russia has captured some in Ukraine, though I dunno if those were all M1A1s — I remember that Ukraine asked for M1A1s instead of M1A2s because they’d get them sooner. A ton of people have access to them. Like, you’re trying to give away information that probably has no value to Russia.
The really stupid thing about this is that I seriously doubt that there’s anything significant that Russia wants and doesn’t have on the M1A2 in 2025. I mean, the tanks are all over the place. ISIL captured some. Russia has captured some in Ukraine, though I dunno if those were all M1A1s — I remember that Ukraine asked for M1A1s instead of M1A2s because they’d get them sooner. A ton of people have access to them. Like, you’re trying to give away information that probably has no value to Russia.