Jack Texeira charged with 7 counts in connection with Internet leak of secret U.S. documents.
Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guard member accused of leaking classified Pentagon documents, was indicted on six felony counts Thursday
A federal grand jury on Thursday formally indicted Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard for posting confidential and secret Pentagon military documents on social media, on six counts related to his retention and transmission of those documents.
Jack Teixeira is the young man behind one of the largest leaks of Pentagon documents in the last decade and was formally charged Thursday with the crimes of transmitting national defense information and extracting classified information.
The Justice Department said in a statement that Teixeira, who was a member of the National Guard, a reserve military corps, is charged with six crimes for which he was indicted in April and was formally charged Thursday on those counts, which include withholding and disseminating national defense information and unauthorized extraction and possession of classified documents or materials.
Teixeira, who has been detained since April 13, accessed the documents at the National Guard base where he worked, took them home and posted them on Discord, an Internet service popular with video game enthusiasts. Subsequently, those documents spread through other social networks, such as Telegram, and made the front pages of major newspapers around the world.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in the statement that Texeira shared them with users “who he knew were not entitled to receive them. In doing so, he allegedly violated U.S. law and endangered national security.”
Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Joshua Levy, recalled that people who are given access to classified material have a duty to safeguard that information.
Most of the information leaked by Texeira was related to the war in Ukraine and gave details about U.S. and NATO plans to reinforce the Ukrainian offensive. It also hinted that the U.S. may have been spying on some of its closest allies, such as Ukraine itself, South Korea and Israel.
Teixeira joined the National Guard in September 2019 and had the clearance to access top-secret information since 2021.
The Department of Justice estimates that it began storing and sharing it around January 2022. It disseminated that information in two ways: in paragraphs written through that platform, or with images of the documents on which the classification of secret or top secret could be read.
Each count of unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information carries a sentence of up to ten years in prison, up to three years of probation, and a fine of up to $250,000.
The Justice Department said a federal judge will determine the sentence and added that the FBI is still investigating the case.
Some analysts compared its potential impact to that provoked in 2013 by Edward Snowden when he exposed the scope of the massive spying programs that the United States put in place after the attacks of September 11, 2001.