BOSTON — Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking top secret government documents, is being held without bail until at least next week.
The Dighton man made a short appearance in U.S. District Court in Boston Friday morning where the case against him has just been posted.
Teixeira was working as an E-3/Airman First Class for the Massachusetts Air National Guard and stationed at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod before the FBI arrested him at his family’s home on Maple Street Thursday.
He faces two charges — “unauthorized removal and transmission of national defense information” and “unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or materials” — carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release.
Teixeira was identified in an FBI affidavit posted in the case Friday as the leader of a Discord server — which is what the gaming-dominated social media platform calls individual groups — where prosecutors say the highly classified military documents were posted online.
The government alleges that on that platform, Teixeira leaked documents on the Russian war with Ukraine, including those that “described the status of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including troop movements, on a particular date.”
Federal prosecutors say that intel “is based on sensitive U.S. intelligence, gathered through classified sources and methods, and contains national defense information.”
U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge David Hennessy on Friday scheduled a full detention hearing for Wednesday at an undetermined time. Hennessy normally sits in federal court in Worcester and said that while he is available for a morning hearing there, should counsel choose to continue in Boston he said he would need it to be an afternoon hearing.
Teixeira appeared in Courtroom 18 on the fifth floor wearing federal detention khaki clothes. He was represented in this initial hearing by Brendan Kelley of the Federal Public Defender’s office in Boston. At the close of the short hearing, Teixeira was handcuffed and led out of the courtroom.
The affidavit states that, “Many of the documents depicted in these images bear classification markings, including ‘TOP SECRET’ markings” and that “Certain of the images appear to depict Government Information that was used to inform senior military and civilian government officials during briefings at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. …
“(I)n or around January 2023, the Subject Username began posting photographs of documents on Server 1 that contained what appeared to be classification markings on official U.S. Government documents….”
It is also revealed that Teixeira “had become concerned that he may be discovered making the transcriptions of text in the workplace, so he began taking the documents to his residence and photographing them.”
The arrest has had at least one prominent national critic, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia.
“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime,” Greene tweeted yesterday at 4:46 p.m. “And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more.”
“Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?” her tweet continued.
In contrast, Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat who represents Teixeira’s home district of Bristol County, issued a statement yesterday saying “any individual(s) who shared these classified documents betrayed the confidence of their country, undermined U.S. foreign policy, and jeopardized the lives of compatriots overseas.”
“They should be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” his statement continued. “Further, the Pentagon will need to explain how material of such sensitive nature was available to personnel who did not have need to know.”
The national debate played out in microcosm in front of the federal courthouse shortly after the hearing and within earshot of the masses of reporters, photographers and videographers covering the event.
“Teixeira is a hero!” a man yelled out repeatedly as he rode his bike in front of the courthouse.
“Redneck!” shouted another man driving a car behind the bicyclist and thrusting his finger toward him. “He’s white trash!”
Three members of Teixeira’s family left the courthouse through a back door but were still spotted by the masses of news media looking for them. They were followed down three or four blocks down Northern Avenue in the Seaport and peppered with questions, which they did not answer before getting in their car and driving away.
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