Jack T., 21, appeared in federal court in Boston accused of being behind one of the biggest leaks of Pentagon documents in the past decade.
This Thursday, the alleged author of the leaks, Jack T, was arrested in a special operation.
The young suspect was charged this Friday (04.14.2023) with two crimes: unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized extraction of classified information and defense materials.
If found guilty, he could face a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
In an affidavit filed in court by FBI investigators, it is stated that Jack T. had had an accreditation since 2022 that authorized him to access material marked top secret.
Verbatim transcripts of secret material
The document details that the young man began to publish the information on social networks in December of last year, first as verbatim transcripts and then through images of documents marked as classified.
Although the investigators did not specify the platform used in the affidavit, reports from the US newspapers The New York Times and The Washington Post indicated that he first published the documents in a chat on the Discord platform.
One of the documents, the statement confirmed, contained information on the “state of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including troop movement on a particular date.”
Platform users helped the FBI
The FBI told the court that it interviewed one of the Discord users on April 10, the social network where Teixeira published the information.
In the interview, the user said that Teixeira had revealed to him that he decided to start taking pictures of the documents because he feared he would be caught transcribing them at his workplace.
On April 12, Discord turned over the information he had on Teixeira to the FBI.
The young man, according to the documents, worked in the area of computer defense at the National Guard base on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, and had been part of the US forces since September 2019.
