DOJ says alleged Pentagon leaker sent documents to international community

Accused Pentagon leaker Jack Teixeira sent classified documents to an international community on the chat forum site Discord, according to a Wednesday filing from federal prosecutors.

In supporting a motion to detain Teixeira ahead of his trial, the Department of Justice (DOJ) accused the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member of sharing documents across multiple servers over the course of many months, including a server with more than 150 members who lived across the world.

DOJ prosecutors said the deliberate sharing of classified information “to more than 150 users worldwide grossly undermines the notion of a limited transmission to a small private community.”

“And [it] refutes the defendant’s self-serving narrative that he failed to appreciate the harms that his activities could cause,” they wrote. “The defendant cannot now be trusted to refrain from causing further harm.”

Judge David Hennessy at the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts paused an immediate ruling late last month on whether to hold Teixeira until he faces trial on charges of willfully retaining and sharing classified national secrets in violation of the Espionage Act.

Hennessy is expected to hear more arguments on the pretrial detention Friday.

Teixeira’s lawyers have argued for his pretrial release on the grounds that he never intended for the documents to leak out for the world to see.

In a Wednesday filing, they wrote other defendants who have leaked or held classified secrets have been released ahead of trial before and that Teixeira would not pose a threat to the public or the government based upon a set of “stringent” conditions for his release.

The DOJ, however, has also submitted evidence Teixeira allegedly expressed a desire to kill people, talked of an “assassination van” and voiced racist slurs.

Prosecutors also argue Teixeira boasted about his connections to classified information and knew what he was doing was wrong, sharing messages he allegedly wrote on Discord, including one where he said he didn’t care “what they say I can or can’t share.”

“That the defendant continued posting classified information despite keen awareness that
he was violating the law and even after being admonished multiple times by superiors is a clear
indication that he will be undeterred by any restrictions this court places upon him and will not
hesitate to circumvent those restrictions if he deems it in his interest to do so,” prosecutors argued in the filings.

Teixeira, who served as an IT professional at Otis Air National Guard Base, was arrested last month after the documents, some of them labeled top secret, leaked out of Discord and onto the broader online sphere.

The Pentagon documents detailed everything from the Russia-Ukraine war to the affairs of U.S. allies, including South Korea and Israel and the leak spilled embarrassing secrets about American intelligence and insights.