Airman Who Leaked Categorized Paperwork on Discord Sentenced to fifteen Years

A federal choose on Tuesday sentenced former Air Nationwide Guardsman Jack Teixeira to fifteen years in jail for sharing top-secret details about the struggle in Ukraine with a bunch of disaffected players.

The FBI arrested Teixeira, then 21, in 2023 and accused him of utilizing his top-secret safety clearance to entry labeled materials and submit transcriptions and photos of the paperwork on a Discord server. He later pleaded responsible to 6 counts of willful retention and transmission of labeled info.

The case raised embarrassing questions for the Air Nationwide Guard about how a junior officer with a historical past of violent comments—together with discussing weapons, Molotov cocktails, and making racial threats at college—had entry to such delicate info. The primary media stories about labeled paperwork showing on Discord took intelligence officers by surprise, and a spokesperson for the Nationwide Safety Council informed the New York Occasions, “We don’t know what the motive is. We don’t know what else is likely to be on the market.”

The Occasions later reported that members of 1 Discord server the place Teixeira posted the labeled paperwork, referred to as Thug Shaker Central, mentioned Teixeira wished to show the opposite struggle game-loving posters what struggle was truly like and shared lots of of paperwork, together with battlefield maps from Ukraine.

Division of Justice officers said that Teixeira obtained the paperwork from a labeled workstation on the Otis U.S. Air Nationwide Guard Base in Massachusetts and that a few of the photos he posted of the paperwork included marks labeling them “SECRET” and “TOP SECRET.”

An inspector common investigation carried out after the arrest discovered that the Air Power had missed or didn’t react to a lot of indicators that Teixeira was improperly utilizing his safety clearance. On a number of events members of his unit reported Teixeira for viewing info he didn’t want, however the complaints weren’t correctly documented or acted upon even after supervisors had ordered him to cease doing intelligence “deep dives,” based on the investigation report.

“Three people in A1C Teixeira’s supervisory chain had details about as many as 4 separate cases of safety incidents and potential insider menace indicators they have been required to report,” the inspector common concluded. “Had any of those three members come ahead and correctly disclosed the knowledge they held on the time of the incidents, the size and depth of the unauthorized disclosures might have been lowered by a number of
months.”

The Air Nationwide Guard disciplined greater than a dozen service members following the inspector common investigation, together with Col. Sean Riley, who was faraway from command of the 102nd Intelligence Wing.