Jack Teixeira pleaded guilty on Monday to leaking highly classified Pentagon documents on a social-media platform last year and accepted a 16-year prison sentence.
Teixeira plead guilty to all six counts charging him with willful retention and transmission of national-defense information and accepted the lengthy prison sentence in exchange for prosecutors dropping additional charges. Additionally, he received a $50,000 fine and will have 36 months of supervised release. He must also attend a debrief with the Departments of Defense and Justice and return any classified materials that might remain in his possession.
The former Massachusetts Air National guardsman was accused of posting hundreds of pages of classified documents about the ongoing war in Ukraine on Discord, a messaging app dedicated to video-game players. The leaked documents also concerned information about intelligence on China, the Middle East, and Israel’s spy agency Mossad.
Teixeira, 22, started accessing classified records starting as early as January 2022, and continued doing so until he was taken into federal custody last April. He was serving at the Otis Air National Guard Base in Cape Cod at the time.
The defendant initially pleaded not guilty in June, two months after he was arrested for alleged violations of the Espionage Act.
In 1917, during World War I, Congress passed the Espionage Act to criminalize the release of national secrets that could be used to harm the U.S. or benefit a foreign adversary.
While ranked as an airman first class, Teixeira obtained the sensitive files through his high-level security clearance as an IT specialist working on military communications networks. From there, he shared both handwritten transcriptions and photographs of the documents on a private Discord server, called Thug Shaker Central, before they were disseminated across other major social-media platforms.
Before the FBI arrested him in April, Teixeira reportedly told his gamer friends, “I never wanted it to get like this. I prayed to God that this would never happen. And I prayed and prayed and prayed. Only God can decide what happens from now on.”