Pentagon leaker Teixeira faces sentencing, US seeks 17-year prison term
PHOTO CAPTION: 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
By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) - Prosecutors will urge a U.S. judge on Tuesday to sentence Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira to nearly 17 years in prison for leaking online highly classified military documents, including records related to Russia's war in Ukraine.
Teixeira, 22, will appear before a federal judge in Boston for sentencing after pleading guilty to perpetrating what U.S. prosecutors call "one of the most significant and consequential violations of the Espionage Act in American history."
Teixeira, who has remained in custody since his arrest in April 2023, pleaded guilty in March 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 messaging app Discord.
Teixeira is slated to face a court-martial in March on separate military charges brought by the Air Force that he obstructed justice and failed to obey a lawful order. His military lawyers are negotiating a resolution of the case, according to his defense team.
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 chatting app 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 say.
His leaks included information concerning the provision of equipment to Ukraine and how it would be used, following Russia's 2022 invasion.
Teixeira's lawyers in court papers said he "sincerely regrets the decisions that he made and the harm it has caused," and they urged U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani to only impose an 11-year term.
They said the autistic, isolated young man's intent was never to harm the U.S. 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.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Rod Nickel)
