Jack Teixeira, a young military computer technician accused of leaking highly classified government intelligence, will enter a guilty plea before a federal district court judge in Boston on Monday. Federal prosecutors on Thursday filed a motion notifying the judge that Teixeira intended to change his earlier plea of not guilty.
Teixeira was accused of using his top-secret security clearance to access classified government computer networks on an Air Force base in Cape Cod, where he worked with a unit providing intelligence support to the military. A Washington Post investigation revealed that, while Teixeira was serving in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, he shared hundreds of classified documents as well as his own summaries of classified reports on Discord, an online chat platform popular with video gamers.
Teixeira’s leaks revealed information about the Russia-Ukraine war, China’s development of hypersonic spy drones, North Korea’s nuclear weapons development, conflicts in the Middle East and the Ukrainian sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline.
Teixeira, 22, was arrested last April and charged with six counts of illegal retention and transmission of national defense information. If he had been found guilty at trial, he would have faced a prison sentence of 30 years to life, according to federal sentencing guidelines. A guilty plea suggests Teixeira will serve substantially less time.
The leaks were seen as one of the most serious breaches of U.S. national security in recent years. Teixeira had been sharing information in a small Discord server that he formed with friends during the covid-19 pandemic. He also posted classified information about the war in Ukraine as early as February 2022 in another, larger server with hundreds of active users. Government authorities didn’t notice any of the leaks until the spring of 2023.
Many of the documents Teixeira was accused of disclosing focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Daily intelligence updates – as well as briefing documents prepared for senior leaders – showed that U.S. officials knew Ukraine was running desperately low on munitions and taking heavy casualties. Ukraine’s daring sabotage missions inside Russia weren’t shaking the public’s resolve, nor had they deterred President Vladimir Putin from continuing to feed his troops into a veritable meat grinder. Against that backdrop, the prospects for a much anticipated 2023 counteroffensive to turn the tide of the war were slim, but U.S. officials remained publicly upbeat.
Those dire forecasts resonate today as Ukraine faces critical shortfalls in munitions and Congress is deadlocked on a spending measure to provide aid to the beleaguered country. Some U.S. officials are concerned that without additional support, Ukrainian defenses could be at risk of collapse.
The Discord leaks were remarkable for their breadth. They were also of-the-moment; reports spanning a period from around February to March of 2023 offered deep insights into events that were developing by the day.
The leaks exposed classified information on an apparent plan by Egypt to supply Russia with weapons in contravention of the wishes of the United States. They revealed the Pentagon’s assessment of Taiwan’s vulnerability to Chinese attack. Other classified documents revealed never-before-seen images of the Chinese spy balloon that entered North American airspace in late January 2023 and assessed that Beijing was readying a base to deploy high-altitude spy drones that could travel at least three times the speed of sound.
Teixeira’s case also revealed profound weaknesses in how the military protects highly classified information. Some of the intelligence Teixeira shared was so sensitive that U.S. and other government officials said it would risk human lives if it were widely exposed.
Teixeira was able to obtain a security clearance despite a history of making violent threats. He had been suspended from his high school for threatening to bring weapons to school. A police investigation showed that he used racist language and told fellow students that he wanted to kill Black people.
The Post investigation found that the online community where Teixeira routinely shared classified information was a hotbed of racist and antisemitic rhetoric, whose members, most of them teenage boys united by an interest in military gear and warfare, peddled gory videos and traded conspiracy theories about government agents.
Teixeira told friends he had seen proof, in government intelligence, that federal authorities knew in advance about mass shootings and let them happen to create a pretext for tougher gun control laws. Some of them believed his baseless claims, they said, because Teixeira obviously had access to a wide range of government secrets. At work, prosecutors alleged, Teixeira hunted for information to prove his misguided conspiracy theories, searching intelligence databases for keywords about mass shootings in Las Vegas, Buffalo, and Uvalde, Tex.
Teixeira shared classified information with his friends to impress them, they said, and to demonstrate that he had access to information and knowledge about important world events that others did not. High school friends described Teixeira as fascinated with trivia about military hardware and weaponry, and said his interests often turned pedantic.
Many of the members of the Discord group looked up to Teixeira as their leader. His military credentials and job with an intelligence unit gave him an aura of credibility and authority, friends said. During the isolation of the pandemic, they spent much of their days together online.
(c) 2024, The Washington Post · Shane Harris
Talk about hubris and juvenile law, they just wait to choke the kid. And just fine gigantic corporate felony with “fines” — no personal responsibility for gamblers (investors) or employees. They could never even tow the Shev’a Mitzvos.
And Hunter Biden walks away free.