Air Force officials caught Airman Jack Teixeira taking notes and conducting in-depth searches for classified materials months before he was accused of leaking a vast trove of government secrets, but did not fire him from his job, according to a file from the United States Air Force. Justice Department on Wednesday.
On two occasions, in September and October 2022, Airman Teixeira’s superiors in the Massachusetts Air National Guard admonished him after reports that he had taken “concerning actions” while handling classified information. Those included putting a note in his pocket after reviewing classified information within his unit, according to a court filing Friday for a hearing before a federal magistrate in Worcester, Mass., to determine whether he should be released on bail.
Airman Teixeira – who until March was sharing secrets with numerous online friends from around the world on Discord, a social media platform popular with gamers – was “instructed not to take any more notes in any form on classified intelligence information” , lawyers of the department’s national division. security department wrote in an 11-page memo advocating for his indefinite detention.
The aviator’s superiors also ordered him to “stop diving deep into classified intelligence information,” though it’s not clear how or if they’re enforcing that directive.
The new information was intended to bolster the government’s argument that Airman Teixeira’s relentless search for information to share with friends online – which he acknowledged was inappropriate – makes his release a threat to national security. But it also raised troubling new questions about whether the military missed opportunities to stop or mitigate one of the most damaging intelligence leaks in recent history.
The signs that something was wrong seem unmistakable in retrospect. In late January, a master sergeant who worked at the Cape Cod Air Force Base in Massachusetts noticed that Airman Teixeira was improperly accessing reports on the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System, the Pentagon’s secure intranet system, the memo said.
“Teixeira had been previously instructed to focus on his own career duties and not seek intelligence products,” one of his superiors wrote in a Feb. 4 memo that prosecutors had attached to their file.
Not only was Airman Teixeira allowed to keep his job — he appears to have retained his top-secret security clearance — but he was subsequently awarded the second of two certificates after completing training designed to prevent the “unauthorized disclosure” of classified information.
In their filing, prosecutors cited those training sessions as evidence that Airman Teixeira, 21, knowingly broke the law despite being “well aware of his obligations” and not to be trusted if released.
Two of Airman Teixeira’s superiors at the 102nd Intelligence Wing on Cape Cod have been suspended pending the completion of an internal investigation by the Air Force’s inspector general, according to a spokeswoman for the agency, Ann Stefanek. Their access to classified information has been temporarily blocked, she added.
The government also introduced previously undisclosed Discord posts, including one from December 2022 in which he bragged about violating “breaking a bunch of UD regs” – a reference to “unauthorized disclosure” – but said it couldn’t do anything for him care “what they say I can or cannot share.”
In their own file, Mr Teixeira’s legal team, which is seeking his release on $20,000 bail, argued that he was not at risk of releasing new information, pointing to past cases where leak suspects were not held indefinitely .
Mr Teixeira’s father told the Worcester judge last month that he would take responsibility to keep an eye on his son if he was released and that he would use security cameras around his home to warn him of suspicious behavior while he is on trial. it was work.
Much of what is widely known about Airman Teixeira’s actions comes from news organization reports of posts he posted on two Discord servers, including one with about 600 members from at least 25 countries, according to their online profiles, DailyExpertNews reports. . .
In its new filing, the government said Mr Teixeira had leaked information on at least one other Discord server with at least 150 users, “some of whom claimed to live abroad”.
Airman Teixeira “disregarded his oath and published sensitive, top secret documents for his own pleasure,” prosecutors wrote in their plea for his detention. “The court should not rely on the promises he would make in these proceedings to mean more to him than the many promises the defendant has already broken.”
The government had previously argued that releasing Airman Teixeira would pose a danger to his community, citing a history of violent remarks and racist threats, including comments about making a Molotov cocktail that got him suspended from high school several years ago .
A Times investigation revealed that Airman Teixeira was fixated on guns, mass shootings and shadowy conspiracy theories. While he enjoyed the respectability and access to intelligence gained through his military service and top-secret endorsement, he boiled with contempt for the government and accused the United States of a myriad of covert, nefarious activities: making biological and chemical weapons in Ukrainian. laboratories, creating the Islamic State, even orchestrating mass shootings.
“The FBI and other 3-letter agencies are contacting these unhinged mentally ill kids and convincing them to commit mass shootings,” Airman Teixeira wrote in an online chat group, sharing a debunked conspiracy theory after a gunman killed three people last summer in a mall in Indiana. . The gunman, he claimed, was one of several mass shooters prepared by the government as part of a secret plot to “get people to vote for” gun control.