Jack Teixeira makes first court appearance

Prosecutors charged a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman on Friday with unlawfully taking and sharing a trove of highly classified intelligence documents in a security breachthat has exposed significant vulnerabilities in the way the U.S. retains some of its most closely held secrets. 

The Justice Department, in a brief hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, charged Airman First Class Jack Teixeira, 21, with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material.

The federal public defender’s office in Boston didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Airman Teixeira’s family members couldn’t be reached for comment.

The criminal case against Airman Teixeira is the latest chapter in a fast-moving probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Pentagon and other agencies after the apparent classified documents were discovered in digital posts on Discord, a social-media platformpopular with gamers, and other online forums. 
 

According to the government, the classified material started appearing online as early as December 2022.

The government charging document unsealed Friday also offered glimpses into how investigators identified Airman Teixeira as the suspect with the help of billing records from Discord and through interviews with at least one other member of the small, tightknit group that the guardsman allegedly ran on that platform.

The group was formed “to discuss geopolitical affairs and current and historical wars,” the charging document said.

A member of that group told investigators that Airman Teixeira initially posted government information to the group as paragraphs of text but began posting photographs of documents in January, according to the charging document.

The group member told investigators that Airman Teixeira mentioned in a conversation that he had become concerned about being discovered making transcriptions of text at work, so he began taking documents home and photographing them. 

In April, as the documents spread online, Airman Teixeira used his government computer to access classified intelligence reporting to search for the word “leak,” in what investigators say was an attempt to assess whether the intelligence community knew the identity of the leaker of the trove of documents. 

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