Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Tuesday for disclosing classified military documents on social media, including documents related to the war in Ukraine.
Teixeira, 22, was sentenced in Boston by Judge Indira Talwani after pleading guilty to perpetrating what U.S. prosecutors call “one of the most significant violations of the Espionage Act in history.” of the United States,” reports Reuters.
Teixeira, who has remained in custody since his arrest in April 2023, pleaded guilty in March to six counts of possessing and knowingly transmitting classified information related to national defense following the leak last year of a set of files classified to a group of players in the sector. Discord messaging app.
Before his sentencing, Teixeira also entered into a written agreement to other military charges brought by the Air Force accusing him of obstruction of justice and failure to obey a lawful order, the lawyer said of defense Michael Bachrach in court. He was scheduled to appear before a court martial in March.
Before his arrest, Teixeira was an Airman 1st Class at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he worked as a cyber defense operations officer or IT support specialist.
Despite being a low-level airman, Teixeira had a top-secret security clearance, and starting in January 2022, he began accessing hundreds of classified documents related to topics such as the invasion Russian from Ukraine, according to prosecutors.
Teixeira shared classified information on the chat app Discord on private servers while boasting about having access to “material on Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iran and China,” according to prosecutors. Teixeira did this even though his superiors twice reprimanded him in 2022 for his handling of classified information and warned him not to delve into classified information, according to prosecutors.
His leaks included information regarding the supply of equipment to Ukraine and how it would be used after the 2022 Russian invasion. Teixeira’s lawyers said he “sincerely regrets the decisions he made and the damage he has caused,” and urged Talwani to do so. imposed only a sentence of 11 years. They said the isolated, autistic young man’s intention was never to harm the United States, but rather to enlighten his Internet friends about world events, including the war. in Ukraine.
“I wanted to know everything I could about it because I thought it was probably the biggest event in the history of my generation,” Teixeira said in February during a briefing with the intelligence community, according to court documents.
