Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest.

Today, jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich appeared in a Moscow courtroom—held, like all defendants on trial in Russia, in what is essentially a bulletproof fish tank. The court—if we can call it that—rejected Evan’s bail request and upheld his detention in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison until the end of May. Meanwhile, the independent Russian-language outlet Meduza reported that Evan’s lawyers believe that their client will be freed in a prisoner swap, perhaps for two Russian illegals who were arrested in Slovenia in January, but that this will only happen after a trial and the inevitable guilty verdict, much like in the case of Brittney Griner. Evan was charged with espionage while doing his job as a journalist, which carries a sentence of up to 20 years in jail.

I will continue to update you on Evan’s plight because it is so very important not to forget him, and to push for his freedom. If you want to do more, you can follow accounts dedicated to his release on social media or visit this site dedicated to his release for tips on how to help.

But now, nearly two weeks later and with the benefit of some hindsight—and a firmer grasp of what was leaked—Washington is finally breathing again. “It’s serious, but it’s not the end of the world,” said retired C.I.A. clandestine officer Marc Polymeropoulos. “Nobody in my intelligence circles thinks it’s the end of the world. They think it’s serious, but it’s not catastrophic.”

The emerging consensus seems to be that this leak, while plenty damaging, could have been far, far worse. Teixeira, after all, was no Snowden, an ideologue who took a far more systematic approach to squirreling away secret documents. Snowden, who is now a Russian citizen, took thousands of documents out the door, while Teixeira, who seems to have been driven mostly by a puerile desire to impress his teenage gamer friends, only stole hundreds. Snowden revealed to the world the extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance, compromising major U.S. intelligence gathering systems. Teixeira’s leak, on the other hand, was more limited. “It’s not the crown jewels of our signals or human intelligence,” Polymeropoulos explained.

Nor was Teixeira’s document dump comparable to what Chelsea Manning handed to WikiLeaks. “The fact that it’s more limited in terms of volume, the damage is less widespread,” said a former senior State Department official. “We don’t have every embassy in the world combing their files to see whose name was mentioned and who might be in danger as a result.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean the military is unconcerned. While the intelligence community and the State Department have been relatively nonchalant, the Pentagon that is still “freaking out,” as one source put it, because the leak came from an active servicemember and involves so much of their classified work. And the leak is still generating new headlines. After the partial tranche of 50-odd pages appeared on Telegram and Twitter two weeks ago, the Washington Post now has hundreds of these documents in its possession. One military analyst suggested that we are exactly one document away from this becoming a far more damaging scandal.

Indeed, journalists are still scouring the leak for more juicy revelations, like the news that the Biden administration apparently pressured Egypt, a major recipient of U.S. military aid, to back away from providing weapons to Russia. The drip-drip will also inevitably complicate the White House’s messaging on the war, which stresses that the U.S. is not directly involved in Ukraine’s efforts. In fact, if these documents make one thing crystal clear, it’s the extent to which the U.S. is embedded in the Ukrainian conflict, including providing targeting data on points inside Russia. Vladimir Putin has been saying all along that Russia is fighting not Ukraine, but America inside Ukraine—and it seems he wasn’t too far from the truth for once.

Which is why Washington’s national security community is far more engrossed in conversations about access to information and who should have it than they are about what the leaked information actually is. “My main reaction was surprise that a 21-year-old had access to intelligence that most American ambassadors in Europe don’t,” said a Democratic foreign policy insider who is close to the Biden administration.

That sounds elitist to some, including those who have served in the military. “There are sailors with top secret clearances who take care of the nuclear reactor in an attack sub who are 19 years old. There are 20-year-olds working at the N.S.A.,” Polymeropoulos argued. “The U.S. military gives a ton of responsibility to very young folks.”

That accelerated after 9/11, as the intelligence community was slammed for failing to predict or prevent the massive terrorist attack. One of the culprits turned out to be the siloing—or “stovepiping”—of information, such as the infamous “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” memo that made its way into Bush’s daily briefing but was too vague to be actionable. Different government agencies had different parts of the puzzle but, because they didn’t share their secrets with one another, they couldn’t see the whole and terrifying picture until it was too late. In response, Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to help coordinate and share intelligence where there used to be firewalls. “After 9/11, the intelligence community was hammered for compartmentalization, so you open the spigots,” said Polymeropoulos. “But when you open the spigots, the risk of exposure rises and stuff like this happens, when a dude in Cape Cod has access to intel that he never would have had before 9/11.”

When the war on terror began, military leaders like General Stanley McChrystal advocated for the broader sharing of knowledge across the armed services, believing that the whack-a-mole fight against a diffuse enemy would be easier when more military officers were able to act quickly and locally if they were empowered with information gleaned from intelligence. The affinity for business strategy and leadership literature in this realm of American officialdom only sealed the deal: the mantra that “information is power” reigned here, too.

In the meantime, the I.C. was classifying just about everything—sticking “top secret” labels on documents that didn’t merit them—a practice that has been critiqued in recent years. (This broke into the mainstream discussion when Trump, Biden, and Pence were found to have classified materials in their offices—or pool rooms.) “The U.S. national security establishment suffers from two pathologies that interact with each other,” the military analyst said. “The first is a persistent tendency to over-classify everything and the second is the inevitable need to give out access to far too many people so that they can work with this information. And because of those tendencies, at the end of the day, what you find is that the system hinges on its weakest link, because so much is kept secret and so much access must be given out in order to get things done. Often those at the most junior levels of the system have access to some of the most classified information.”

The analyst has a point. So much of D.C. has a security clearance that it sometimes seems like it nearly obviates the district’s decriminalization of marijuana. Because weed is still illegal under federal laws, smoking it—now or in the past—can compromise one’s security clearance, as several Biden administration hires found out during the transition. The ubiquity of security clearances in my world also made it remarkably difficult to get people to talk to me for this story, even off the record. God forbid someone discovered that they had talked to a journalist about information that had never officially been declassified—which the Teixeira documents weren’t—and get them in trouble. What if they lost their security clearance as a result? How could they ever get a plum national security job—or access to the country’s juiciest information—ever again? As one source noted, “You can tell who has a clearance by who hasn’t commented on it on social media. It’s a dead giveaway.”

No matter how self-serious the so-called Blob can be, many of the people in my world take their security clearances incredibly seriously. It is a trust they don’t want to violate, not only because it could jeopardize future career advancement, but because these are often the most idealistic and committed. They want to change the world, serve their country, et cetera. They are also the most likely to land in senior posts, where they truly need access to the kind of information Jack Teixeira flaunted in front of his teenage buddies—one of whom, I heard, is now grounded.

As he waits in prison and as his actions revive the debate on what is worth classifying and who should have access to the government’s secrets, there are many who worry that the inevitable over-correction will be almost as harmful. “What always happens after these kinds of exposures is a real kind of clampdown, which usually affects the people who really do have a need-to-know. That’s my experience of how this tends to go,” said the former State official, who was in key positions during the Snowden and WikiLeaks breaches. “Very little will change in the I.C. and the D.O.D., where these leaks tend to come from. They’ll just cut everyone else off.”

The right-wing political valence of the Teixeira leak, along with the alarming number of veterans and active-duty service members who participated in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, is only reinforcing the F.B.I.’s assessment that domestic extremists are “one of the most persistent threats to the United States today.” If the American political climate continues on its current trajectory, there will be serious questions about whether the military and intelligence communities have a problem in their own ranks. “I had a conversation with a European colleague, before [Teixeira] was discovered,” the think tank head told me, “and they said, ‘Do you think your intel has been infected by your polarization?’”

It’s an issue that Polymeropoulos, a veteran of the war on terror, brought up as well. “For me, this entire story is more about the clearance process. How do you onboard and monitor people who have access to really sensitive stuff?” he said. “This guy seems like an alt-right nut with racist views. How did this not come up in his clearance process? What about other people’s extremist views? How is the D.O.D. going to tackle the domestic extremism issue when the F.B.I. has named it as a top threat? It’s going to be really politically fraught in the U.S. because the right is going to go nuts.”

In the meantime, the Pentagon is busy fending off attacks from the American right that it is “too woke.” Last month, before Chairman Mark Milley testified in front of Congress about the country’s military budget, his team spent weeks preparing for the inevitable attacks from the chamber’s right wing that military readiness was somehow negatively impacted by diversity and inclusion programs. (It’s not.) But when I asked a Pentagon source whether the Department would start taking the domestic extremist threat into account when assigning access to its choicest secrets, the source told me they were not sure that this was something they were actively considering.

Julia