Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to say Friday if others will also be charged over the leak of classified US documents after a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman was arrested for allegedly spilling the intel online.
Jack Teixeira, who faced a Massachusetts court earlier on Friday for the first time, is accused of accessing classified materials at the Cape Cod base where he worked before sharing them with members of his private Discord chat group.
Prosecutors allege the documents — including some that detailed secrets of the Ukraine war — then spread like wildfire across social media.
Asked if the feds were looking at any other suspects in the case, Garland told reporters in Washington DC: “I’m really not able to talk anymore. It’s an ongoing investigation.”
“This is not just about taking home documents, that is of course illegal itself. This is about the transmission, both the unlawful retention and the transmission of the document,” Garland continued.
“There are very serious penalties associated with that.”
The attorney general stressed the national security implications of the case — and vowed to send a message.
“People who sign agreements to be able to receive classified documents acknowledge the importance to the national security of not disclosing those documents — and we intend to send that message, how important it is to our national security,” he said.
Teixeira, who was arrested outside his mother’s North Dighton, Mass., home on Thursday following a weeklong probe into the leak, is charged with unlawfully copying and transmitting classified defense records.
According to an affidavit unsealed Friday, an FBI agent said Teixeira had held a top secret security clearance since 2021 and that he also maintained sensitive compartmented access to other highly classified programs.
“Based on my training and experience, I know that to acquire his security clearance, Teixeira would have signed a lifetime binding non-disclosure agreement in which he would have had to acknowledge that the unauthorized disclosure of protected information could result in criminal charges,” the agent said in a sworn statement.
After their initial appearance in the private Discord channel, the classified pages gained wider circulation after they were posted on a second channel linked to YouTuber “wow_mao” on Feb. 28.
They then spread even quicker when a member of that channel posted some of the documents to a bigger channel called “Minecraft Earth Map” on March 4.
Discord’s billing records and interviews with another user helped the FBI identify Teixeira as the alleged leaker, the affidavit says.
Teixeira also allegedly searched the word “leak” on his government-issued computer on April 6 — the same day the public found out about the intel breach in a New York Times report.
The unidentified user, who was interviewed by the feds on Monday, said a Discord username linked to Teixeira had started posting what appeared to be classified information around December of last year.
Teixeira, who authorities say is the leader of the channel, allegedly started typing out the documents to share with the group but later switched to taking them home and photographing them because he was “concerned that he may be discovered making the transcriptions of text in the workplace,” the affidavit alleges.