A federal court in Boston on Friday charged an Air National Guard officer with the largest leak of classified documents in 10 years.
Jack Teixeira was arrested last Thursday. It took the FBI a week to find the man responsible for leaking documents affecting the national security interests of the United States and its closest allies, including Ukraine, Israel and South Korea.
Teixeira was charged with “unauthorized storage and transmission of national defense information”. The hearing took place in Boston. He was also charged with “unauthorized seizure and storage of classified documents or materials”. The charges carry prison terms of ten and five years, respectively.
Teixeira wore a tan jumpsuit and looked grim as he appeared before a Massachusetts federal court judge in Boston at 10:00 a.m.
During the meeting, his father shouted, “We love you, Jack”, to which Teixeira replied, “I love you too, dad.”
He was not asked to plead guilty and was detained pending another hearing scheduled for next Wednesday.
Teixeira is suspected of having posted a document in the closed group Thug Shaker Central on the social network Discord. He was registered there under the pseudonym OG.
At first, he manually transcribed the contents of secret documents to share with band members, but then began photographing the documents, warning other band members not to share them, according to the Washington Post.
Some of the documents later appeared on other sites, including Twitter, Telegram and the 4Chan forum.
The investigation has not yet discovered what prompted Teixeira to take these measures.
Jack Teixeira joined the US Air National Guard in September 2019 and was an information and communications technology specialist. He belonged to the rank of junior and file (airman first class).
The affidavit says Teixeira had a top secret security clearance since 2021.
Friends of Teixeira described him in an interview with The Washington Post as a religious man and a libertarian interested in guns.
According to the newspaper, Teixera’s parents are also military. His father spent 34 years in the same military unit as his son, while Teixeira’s mother worked for nonprofits supporting veterans.
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