Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts National Air Guard, was charged Friday with unauthorized detention and transmission of national defense information, as well as unauthorized removal of classified information and defense materials related to dozens of leaked classified Pentagon documents.
Teixeira was arrested Thursday after it was asserted by an online friend of his, without stating his real name, that he’d initially leaked the documents within his small chat group on the Discord platform that’s popular with gamers.
He appeared in a prison jumpsuit at a brief hearing in Boston before Magistrate Judge David Hennessy, the clerk of the District Court in Massachusetts.
Teixeira did not enter a plea and was ordered detained pending a detention hearing set for this coming Wednesday.
Teixeira joined the Air National Guard in September 2019 and worked as a cybersecurity systems journeyman as part of 102nd Intelligence Wing based on Cape Cod, a position through which he held the highest level of security clearance granted by the federal government for top secret information.
In an interview published in The Washington Post on Wednesday, the alleged leaker’s online friend said he’d shared documents among an invite-only Discord chat group that consisted of about two dozen people, mostly men and boys.
The friend said that while using language that was filled with acronyms and jargon, the leaker claimed to have brought the documents home from his job at a “military base,” and that he had worked for hours to write up the classified documents to share with those in the Discord group to keep them “in the loop.”
Teixiera was arrested within days of the Department of Justice saying it was investigating the source of the online leak of some 100 documents about U.S. spying on Russia’s military in Ukraine.
On Thursday Pentagon press secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said the Defense Department was reviewing “the scope and impact” of the leaked documents, which reveal U.S. spying not just on adversaries but also on allies.
