Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was sentenced this Tuesday (12) to 15 years in prison for leaking highly confidential military documents onto the internet, including records related to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Teixeira, 22, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston after pleading guilty to perpetrating what U.S. prosecutors call “one of the most significant and consequential violations of the Espionage Act in American history.”
The young man, 3, pleaded guilty in March to six charges. Among them is the intentional retention and transmission of confidential information related to national defense due to a leak of a set of confidential documents to a group of gamers on the messaging application Discord.
Before sentencing, Teixeira also entered into a written agreement to resolve separate military allegations made by the Air Force that he obstructed justice and failed to obey a lawful order, defense attorney Michael Bachrach said in court. He was supposed to be court-martialed in March.
Teixeira was an Airman 1st Class at Otis Air National Guard Base in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he worked as a cyber defense operations journeyman or information technology support specialist.
Despite being a low-ranking airman, Teixeira had a top-secret security clearance and, starting in January 2022, began accessing hundreds of classified documents related to topics including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to prosecutors.
Teixeira shared confidential information on the chat app Discord on private servers bragging about having access to “things for Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iran and China,” according to prosecutors.
He was reprimanded twice in 2021 for handling classified information and warned against engaging deeply with intelligence information, prosecutors said.
His leaks included information about the supply of equipment to Ukraine and how it would be used, following the Russian invasion in 2022.
Teixeira’s lawyers, in court documents, said he “sincerely regrets the decisions he made and the harm he caused,” and asked Talwani to impose only an 11-year sentence.
They said the isolated, autistic young man’s intention was never to harm the United States, but to educate the friends he made online about world events, including the war in Ukraine.
“I wanted to know as much as possible about it, because I thought it was probably the biggest — probably the biggest event or thing that happened in the history of my generation,” Teixeira said in February during a debriefing session with the intelligence community, according to the court documents.
