Nationwide Guard airman Jack Teixeira has been charged with unlawful transmission of secret paperwork
The US Air Nationwide Guardsman accused of posting a trove of labeled materials on-line, Jack Teixeira, has been charged on six federal counts, the Justice Division introduced on Thursday.
A federal grand jury opted to indict the 21-year-old soldier for the willful retention of nationwide protection info, after he allegedly shared paperwork marked high secret to the Discord chat platform beginning someday final yr.
“Jack Teixeira was entrusted by america authorities with entry to labeled nationwide protection info – together with info that moderately may very well be anticipated to trigger exceptionally grave harm to nationwide safety if shared,” Legal professional Common Merrick Garland mentioned in an announcement, including that the leak “endangered our nationwide safety.”
A member of the Massachusetts Air Nationwide Guard, Teixeira was granted a top-secret safety clearance in 2021 and is alleged to have illicitly accessed a variety of delicate information, amongst them dozens of pages associated to US army help to Ukraine.
The paperwork allegedly leaked by the suspect revealed that US and NATO particular forces have been lively in Ukraine, that estimated Ukrainian casualties have been greater than publicly acknowledged by US officers, that Kiev’s forces have been low on ammunition, and that the US has spied on its allies all through the battle. American officers have dismissed lots of the information as pretend or doctored.
Following Teixeira’s arrest by the FBI in April, the Pentagon scrambled to find out the total scope of the leak, with Protection Secretary Lloyd Austin noting that senior officers didn’t turn into conscious of the breach till weeks after the actual fact. He mentioned he was solely briefed on the problem on April 6, after media shops started reporting on the contents of the paperwork.
Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh later mentioned the army didn’t know the entire variety of paperwork shared on-line, and even months later information businesses have continued to report on new information.
Teixeira stays in federal custody as he awaits his court docket proceedings, having been denied a request for launch after prosecutors deemed him a flight danger. Every of his six costs carries a most penalty of 10 years in jail and a superb of as much as $250,000, based on the DOJ.
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