BOSTON: Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira was sentenced on Tuesday to 15 years in prison for leaking online highly classified US military documents, including some related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and apologized in court for his actions. Teixeira, 22, was sentenced by US District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston after pleading guilty in March to perpetrating what federal prosecutors have called “one of the most significant and consequential violations” of US anti-espionage law ever committed.
“I’m sorry for all of the harm that I’ve wrought and that I’ve caused,” Teixeira, dressed in an orange jail uniform, told Talwani during his sentencing hearing.
The judge said Teixeira leaked top-secret information after receiving extensive training on the need to protect classified information from disclosure and warnings about the penalties he could face for failing to do so.
An undated picture shows Jack Douglas Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the U.S. Air National Guard, who was arrested by the FBI, over his alleged involvement in leaks online of classified documents, posing for a selfie at an unidentified location. (Social Media Website/via Reuters)
“Despite that, you posted on the Internet, on Discord, hundreds of documents over a period of a year,” Talwani told Teixeira. “The fact that others did not do more to stop you is truly unfortunate.” Teixeira, who has remained in custody since his arrest in April 2023, pleaded guilty to six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information relating to national defense over a leak last year of a trove of classified records to a group of gamers on the Discord messaging app. Ahead of his sentencing, Teixeira also entered into a written agreement to resolve separate military charges brought by the Air Force that he obstructed justice and failed to obey a lawful order, defense lawyer Michael Bachrach said in court. Teixeira had been set to face a court-martial in March.
Before his arrest, Teixeira had been an airman 1st class at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where he worked as a cyber defense operations journeyman, or information technology support specialist.
Despite being a low-level airman, Teixeira held 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 classified information on Discord in private servers while bragging that he had access to “stuff for Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iran and China,” according to prosecutors.
He did so even though his superiors admonished him twice in 2022 about his handling of classified information and warned him against conducting deep dives into intelligence information, prosecutors said. His leaks included information concerning the US provision of equipment to Ukraine and how it would be used, following Russia’s 2022 invasion.
Teixeira’s lawyers in court papers had urged Talwani to impose only an 11-year term. They said Teixeira was autistic and isolated, and that his intent was never to harm the United States but to educate friends he made online about world events, including the Ukraine war.
“I wanted to know as much about it as possible because I thought it was probably the most — probably the biggest event or thing that happened in my generation’s history,” Teixeira said in February during a debriefing session with the intelligence community, according to court papers.
