Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified Pentagon documents online was scheduled to be arraigned in federal court on Wednesday.
The 21-year-old was indicted by a grand jury last week, on six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information in relation to the national defense. He could face 10 years in prison for each charge if convicted.
Court filings by the prosecution in April asserted that Teixeira poses an “ongoing risk to both the national security of the United States and to the community,” noting that November 2022, “the Defendant stated that if he had his way, he would ‘kill a [expletive] ton of people’ because it would be ‘culling the weak minded.'”
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 in 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 April 12, an online friend who did not mention Teixeira by name said he’d shared classified documents with their social media chat group on Discord to keep the 20 or so group members “in the loop.”
Since Teixeira’s April 13 arrest the Pentagon has clamped down, limiting access to classified materials in the wake of the leak, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed a 45-day review of classified intelligence handling across the Defense Department.
Teixeira’s arraignment is scheduled for 3:45 p.m. ET before Magistrate Judge David H. Hennessy in Worcester, Massachusetts.
