Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was sentenced on Tuesday to 15 years in prison for leaking highly classified 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.” American”.
Teixeira, who has remained in custody since his arrest in April 2023, pleaded guilty in March to six counts of willful retention and transmission of confidential information relating to national defense, stemming from a leak last year of a set of confidential documents to a group of gamers on the messaging app Discord.
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Before his sentencing, Teixeira also entered into a written agreement to resolve separate military charges brought by the Air Force, which alleged 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.
Before his arrest, Teixeira was an Airman 1st Class at Otis Air National Guard Base in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he worked as a specialist in cyber defense operations or information technology support.
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.
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Teixeira shared confidential information on the chat app Discord on private servers, bragging about having access to “things about Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iran and China,” according to prosecutors.
He did so despite his superiors reprimanding him twice in 2022 for mishandling classified information and warning him 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 after the Russian invasion in 2022.
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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 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 documents. of the court.
