Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, who was arrested Thursday and stands accused of leaking top secret Pentagon documents about the war in Ukraine, among other things, was arraigned Friday in Boston.
The Justice Department has released the criminal complaint against Teixeira, who is 21. FBI special agent, Patrick Lueckenhoff, told a federal judge there was probable cause to believe Teixeira had violated two parts of Title 18 of the federal code: Section 793, which falls under the Espionage Act, and Section 1924.
The Espionage Act is a World War I-era law that criminalizes the mishandling of national-defense information that could be used to harm the United States or to aid a foreign adversary. It was enacted before the modern classification system for protecting government secrets, which distinguishes between secret and top secret documents, for example.
Under Section 793, Teixeira is accused of illegally retaining and transmitting national-defense information — a conviction carrying a prison sentence of up to 10 years per violation.
Several spies and others who have shared sensitive information with the public and press have been charged with violating the law since 1917. Section 794, which Teixeira is not accused of violating, requires prosecutors to prove the act was done to aid a foreign government, and carries a much harsher punishment of up to life in prison, or death. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were charged with Espionage Act violations and were executed in 1953 after being found guilty of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. According to the BBC, the death penalty can be specifically invoked in a time of war, and in 1953, the U.S. was involved in the war in Korea.
More recently, the Espionage Act has been applied to others who have threatened national security by leaking sensitive information, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
Teixeira is also accused of violating Section 1924, which criminalizes the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material. It is punished by a fine or a prison sentence of up to five years. This scope of this section does not extend to the act of giving the documents to other people, like under the Espionage Act.
However, Section 1924 does specifically refer to classified information, so prosecutors would have to prove to a jury that a mishandled file was classified.
“This is not just about taking home documents, that is of course itself illegal. This is about the transmission…of the documents,” attorney general Merrick Garland said Friday. “There are very serious penalties associated with that. We intend to send that message, how important it is to our national security.”
The complaint says Teixeira posted the classified information as paragraphs of text at first. However, by January 2023, he was posting photographs of the documents which appeared to have the classified markings of official U.S. government documents. The FBI interviewed a member of Teixeira’s online group, who explained one of the documents that was posted was a document which described the status of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including troop movements. The user explained Teixeira became concerned he would be caught transcribing the documents at work, so he began to take them home to photograph.
The FBI’s source explained he had communicated with Teixeira several times by various means. The FBI was told by the source that the leaker called himself “Jack,” appeared to reside in Massachusetts, and claimed that he was in the United States Air National Guard. The FBI also learned that the individual was a white male who was clean-cut in appearance between 20 and 30 years old.
One day before Teixeira was arrested, the social-media platform, Discord, provided the FBI with records of the leaker’s account, which showed his billing name was Jack Teixeira and his address was the same North Dighton, Mass. address Teixeira used in his Air National Guard employment paperwork.
According to a review of government records and information, the FBI learned that since May of 2022, Teixeira has been serving as an E- 3/Airman First Class in the National Guard and has been stationed at Otis Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts. As of February 2023, Teixeira’s title was cyber defense operations journeyman. He held top secret security clearance, which was granted in 2021.
“Based on my training and experience, I know that to acquire his security clearance, Teixeira would have signed a lifetime binding non-disclosure agreement in which he would have had to acknowledge that the unauthorized disclosure of protected information could result in criminal charges,” wrote the special agent.
The document also revealed that on April 6, Teixeira used his government computer to search classified intelligence reporting for the word “leak,” thus indicating that Teixeira was looking to figure out what the intelligence community knew about the leaker’s identity up to that point.
Teixeira will remain in custody pending his detention hearing scheduled for next Wednesday.