Pilot who exposed classified documents is sentenced to 15 years

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Pilot who exposed classified documents is sentenced to 15 years
Pilot who exposed classified documents is sentenced to 15 years

A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced former U.S. National Guard soldier Jack Teixeira to 15 years in prison for sharing top-secret information FBIabout the war in Ukraine with a group of disgruntled gamers.

The FBI arrested Teixeira, then 21 years old, in 2023 and accused him of using his top-secret clearance to access classified material and posting transcripts and photos of documents on the Discord server. He later pleaded guilty to six counts of intentionally storing and transmitting classified information.

The case raised uncomfortable questions for the Air National Guard about how a junior officer with a history of violent speech, including discussions of guns, Molotov cocktails, and racist threats at school, gained access to such sensitive information. The first media reports about the classified documents that appeared on Discord took intelligence officials by surprise, and a National Security Council spokesman told the New York Times: “We don’t know what the motive is. We don’t know what else might be there.”

The Times later reported that members of one of the Discord servers where Teixeira posted the classified documents, called Thug Shaker Central, said Teixeira wanted to teach other war game enthusiasts what war is all about and shared hundreds of documents, including maps of battlefields from Ukraine.

Representatives of the US Department of Justice said that Teixeira received the documents from a classified workstation at Otis Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts and that some of the photos of the documents he posted were marked “SECRET” and “TOP SECRET.”

An investigation by the Inspector General following his arrest found that the Air Force missed or failed to respond to a number of indications that Teixeira was misusing his security clearance. On several occasions, members of his unit reported that Teixeira was reviewing information he did not need, but these complaints were not properly documented and were not addressed even after his superiors ordered him to stop “deep diving” into intelligence, the investigation report said.

“Three individuals in AAC Teixeira’s chain of command had information about four separate security incidents and potential insider threat indicators that they were required to report,” the inspector general concluded. “Had any of these three members come forward and properly disclosed the information they had at the time of the incidents, the duration and depth of the unauthorized disclosures could have been reduced by several
months.”

As a result of the Inspector General’s investigation, more than a dozen Air National Guard members were disciplined, including Colonel Sean Riley, who was removed from command of the 102nd Reconnaissance Wing.

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