Who is the man arrested for the leak of Pentagon documents?

Jack Douglas Teixeira was arrested on Thursday for allegedly leaking highly classified US government documents online, including Department of Defense assessments of the war in Ukraine.

This is what we know about this person.

family background

The 21-year-old was arrested Thursday by a team of heavily armed FBI agents at the home of his mother and stepfather in North Dighton, Massachusetts, and appeared before a federal judge in Boston on Friday.

Teixeira served in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, as did his stepfather.

A social media post on his mother’s flower shop account, made in 2021, shows a now widely shared photo of Teixeira in his military uniform in front of a US flag. The publication notes that Teixeira’s stepbrother and stepfather were also in the military.

Thomas Dufault, his stepfather, retired as a master sergeant in 2019 from the 102nd Intelligence Wing, the same unit Teixeira was in.

Dufault served in the military for 34 years, according to footage of his discharge ceremony seen by Reuters on Friday.

Access to highly classified information

Teixeira worked as a “Cyber ​​Transportation Systems Officer” and was an Airman First Class at the Otis Air National Guard Base near Providence, Rhode Island. His unit, the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts National Guard, is responsible for providing intelligence support to many units of the military.

Teixeira joined the Air National Guard in 2019, which is part of the National Guard that reports to the governor of their respective state or territory. The National Guard is made up of reserve troops who often have civilian jobs or study, and frequently respond to domestic emergencies. Teixeira was under the authority of ‘Title 10’, a designation meaning he was essentially a full-time member.

According to an affidavit released Friday, Teixeira not only had a “top secret” security clearance, but also maintained “sensitive compartmentalized access (SCI)” since 2021, giving him broad access to highly classified information.

It is not clear why Teixeira needed to have such a high security clearance, but one reason could be that he would have needed it to work on high-security systems as part of his duties as a computer technician.

Discord messaging platform

The affidavit said that Teixeira had begun posting classified information on social media around December 2022.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, Teixeira shared the confidential documents with a group of young people who went to a server focused on guns and ammunition issues, a kind of chat room, on Discord, a popular instant messaging platform. between players.

The private server was at one point known as “Thug Shaker Central”.

The Washington Post interviewed two members of the group who described the chat room as a place for dark humor and outrageous commentary, and reported seeing video of Teixeira yelling bigoted and anti-Semitic slurs before firing a rifle.

Reuters could not verify the description of the Post. Discord says that he is cooperating with authorities in the investigation.

The accusation

In a criminal indictment unsealed Friday, Teixeira was accused of illegally copying and possessing confidential military documents. Each offense can carry up to 10 years in prison, and hundreds of documents were allegedly shared.

Chelsea Manning, a US Army private first class, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for sharing documents, videos and diplomatic cables that appeared on WikiLeaks in 2010 but were released in 2017.

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