21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira was charged Friday with retention and transmission of national defense intelligence and willful retention of classified documents. The documents that he released have been characterized by the Department of Defense as being “sensitive and highly-classified material.”
Fox News reported that Teixeira appeared at the federal courthouse in Boston just 24 hours after he was taken into custody by the FBI. He did not enter a plea, and he is set to remain in custody pending a detention hearing that is set to take place on Wednesday, April 19.
If Teixeira is found guilty of the charges, he could face up to 15 years in prison, per BBC.
The young man’s father shouted “I love you, Jack!” during the hearing. And his son replied: “I love you dad.”
The FBI reportedly interviewed a member of a social media platform about the release of the classified information. Some of the leaked information, according to the social media user, had started appearing on the site back in December 2022. The postings, the individual said, appeared within a Discord group that discussed “geopolitical affairs and current and historical wars,” per Fox News.
The individual questioned suggested that Texeira initially posted paragraphs of information, but in January he started posting images of documents that reportedly had classification labels on them. One of the documents is said to have “described the status of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including troop movements, on a particular date,” noting that the information was “based on sensitive US intelligence, gathered through classified sources and methods, and contains national defense information.”
Teixeira was said to have been worried that he was going to be caught transcribing text from the documents in the workplace, which is when he decided to take some of the documents to his residence and photograph them, according to the individual interviewed by the FBI.
Teixeira was given the highest possible security clearance when he worked as a cybersecurity systems journeyman for the Air National Guard, which allowed him access to the most classified information within the federal government.
