Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was sentenced this Tuesday to 15 years in prison for leaking classified military documents on social media, including documentation related to the war in Ukraine.
Teixeira, 22, has been sentenced in Boston by Judge Indira Talwani, after pleading guilty to perpetrating what US prosecutors call “one of the most significant violations of the Espionage Act in US history,” Reuters reports. .
Teixeira, who has remained in custody since his arrest in April 2023, pleaded guilty in March to six counts of knowingly retaining and transmitting classified information related to national defense over the leak last year of a set of classified files to a group of players in the Discord messaging app.
Before his sentencing, Teixeira also reached a written agreement to other military charges brought by the Air Force accusing him of obstruction of justice and failure to obey a lawful order, defense attorney Michael testified in court. Bachrach. He was scheduled to face a court-martial in March.
Before his arrest, Teixeira was an Airman First Class at Otis Air National Guard Base in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he worked as a cyber defense operations officer or computer support specialist.
Despite being a low-level airman, Teixeira had a top-secret security clearance, and starting in January 2022 he began accessing hundreds of classified documents related to topics such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to prosecutors.
Teixeira shared classified information on the chat app Discord on private servers while boasting that he had access to “material on Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iran and China,” according to prosecutors. Teixeira did so even though his superiors reprimanded him twice in 2022 for his handling of classified information and warned him not to dive into classified information, according to prosecutors.
His leaks included information regarding the supply of equipment to Ukraine and how it would be used, following the Russian invasion of 2022. Teixeira’s lawyers stated that he “sincerely regrets the decisions he made and the damage he has caused,” and urged Talwani to I only imposed a sentence of 11 years. They stated that the young man’s intention, autistic and isolated, was never to harm the United States, but rather to enlighten the friends he made on the Internet about world events, including the war in Ukraine.
“I wanted to know everything I could about it because I thought it was probably the biggest event in the history of my generation,” Teixeira said in February during a briefing with the intelligence community, according to court documents.
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