A young US airman was facing up to 10 years in jail today after being remanded in custody for allegedly leaking highly-classified documents that raised fresh questions about America’s ability to safeguard its secrets.
Heavily-armed FBI agents swooped on the home of an IT specialist in the reservist National Guard, identified as 21-year-old Jack Teixeira.
Billing records of an internet social media platform helped the FBI identify Teixeira, according to court records unsealed on Friday.
A judge ordered him held until a detention hearing next Wednesday.
Teixeira arrived in court, handcuffed and in tan jail clothes, ahead of his initial appearance. He sat at a defence table next to his lawyer.
Teixeira’s parents were in the coutroom.
As the hearing came to a close and authorities took Teixeira away, a man seated in the front row of the courtroom shouted “Love you, Jack”.
Teixeira did not look at the man, but responded, “You too, Dad.”
Guns were reportedly found at Teixeira’s property in rural Dighton, Massachusetts. Dressed in red gym shorts and a T-shirt, Teixeira was taken into custody. Aerial news footage showed him walking backwards with his hands raised, being watched by one officer from the turret of an armoured vehicle, before being handcuffed.
The leaks rocked the US intelligence community, partly because they were reportedly put out for weeks through a group of young gamers as part of a suspected display of bravado by Teixeira, allegedly under the nickname “Jack the dripper”, to impress his friends rather than acting as a whistleblower or for a foreign state. Teixeira was due to appear at the federal district court in Boston later today over the leaks of documents on Ukraine and other sensitive matters.
Attorney-general Merrick Garland said he was to be charged with removing or transmitting classified national defence information, a crime under the Espionage Act. Brandon Van Grack, a former justice department national security prosecutor, said the likely charges could carry a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, even if Teixeira did not intend to cause harm.
“This is someone who is facing on the higher end of exposure for years in prison... because the leaks were so damaging,” he said.
Teixeira was a member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard and allegedly at the same time the leader, going by the handle “OG”, in a chat group called Thug Shaker Central, on the instant messaging site Discord, with a couple of dozen mostly young members who discussed guns, wars, video games and shared memes and jokes, some of them racist. US security chiefs were racing to try to limit the fallout from the leaks which involved claims about special forces, including from Britain, being in Ukraine, America spying on allies and an assessment of Kyiv’s military capabilities.
Britain has questioned the accuracy of some of the claims in the documents, believed to number more than 100 and to include some purporting to be “secret” or “top secret”. US defence secretary Lloyd Austin said a Pentagon task force was “working around the clock to assess and mitigate any damage”. A review was also being carried out into “intelligence access, accountability and control procedures”.
President Biden, on a visit to Ireland, said of the leaks that “there’s nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that is of great consequence”, but they are a huge embarrassment to Washington. It was not clear if Teixeira, a low-ranking serviceman, had illegally obtained the information or had authorised access. He is believed to have been a “cyber transport systems specialist” with a higher level of security clearance to ensure protection for networks including hubs and cabling. The leaks, the biggest since the 2013 Edward Snowden affair, also raised questions over whether there was a generational disconnect between older government top brass and young people engaged in a world of gaming.
Eddy Souza, 22, a high school friend of Teixeira, said: “It sounds like it was a stupid kid’s mistake.”
Brigadier-general Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said: “We entrust our members with a lot of responsibility at a very early age. Think about a young combat platoon sergeant, and the responsibility and trust that we put into those individuals to lead troops into combat.” US officials believe most of the materials were genuine. Some, however, appear to have been altered to show inflated estimates for Ukrainian battlefield casualties.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant, a former UK national security adviser, told Sky News that if Teixeira was found to have committed the alleged crime “he is facing probably a very long prison sentence because even though his motivation was not to betray his country or to damage American national security that has been the effect.”
