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Who is Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guard member arrested in Pentagon leak case?
The 21-year-old intelligence specialist was taken into custody by the FBI at his home in Dighton, Mass., on Thursday.
Dylan Stableford, Senior Writer – April 13, 2023
Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the U.S. National Guard, was arrested Thursday in connection with the alleged disclosure of highly classified military documents on the war in Ukraine.
Teixeira, an airman first class with the Massachusetts Air Force National Guard’s 102nd Intelligence Wing, based on Cape Cod, was taken into custody by federal agents at his home in Dighton, Mass., about 45 miles south of Boston and 15 miles east of Providence, R.I.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Teixeira’s arrest in a brief statement at the Justice Department. Garland said that Teixeira surrendered “without incident” and would be charged with the unauthorized removal of classified national defense information. The investigation is ongoing, Garland added.
Texeira is scheduled to make his first court appearance in Boston on Friday, according to Yahoo News partner USA Today.
Footage from a local television news helicopter showed heavily armed tactical agents taking Teixeira, who was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, into custody along a wooded driveway.
The Pentagon and FBI had been scrambling to identify the source of the leak since Friday, when a trove of U.S. Defense Department slides, many marked “Secret” or “Top Secret,” were posted to a private chat group on the Discord platform.
As Yahoo News reported earlier this week, the documents included “intelligence culled from a host of spy agencies — the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and more — with a limitless purview reaching all regions of the globe.”
Speaking to reporters in Dublin earlier Thursday, President Biden said that the United States was closing in on identifying a suspect.
“There’s a full-blown investigation going on, as you know, with the intelligence community and the Justice Department,” Biden said. “And they’re getting close.”
According to the New York Times, which first identified Teixeira as a suspect, he oversaw the private online group on the Discord site called Thug Shaker Central, where “about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.”
The newspaper also spoke with Teixeira’s mother, who said he had recently been working overnight shifts at the base on Cape Cod, and he had recently changed his phone number.
The Military Times reported that Teixeira joined the Air National Guard in September 2019 and that he works as a cyber transport systems journeyman.