Attorney General Merrick Garland revealed on Thursday that the FBI had detained a 21-year-old member of the Air National Guard in connection with a blatant leak of hundreds of pages of highly-classified material from the American government and military.
The Massachusetts Air National Guard’s intelligence branch member, Jack Teixeira, was apprehended “without incident” on Thursday afternoon at a property in Dighton, Massachusetts, according to a statement from the FBI.
The investigation is still underway, and according to the FBI, its officers are still “doing authorized law enforcement action at the property.”
Teixeira was taken into custody, according to Garland, “in connection with an investigation of alleged improper removal, retention, and communication of secret national defense material.”
Unauthorized removal, retention, and communication of classified documents are federal offenses punishable by up to 10 years in prison under the Espionage Act.
The leaked documents apparently contained highly sensitive material about how the U.S. spies on allies and enemies, as well as American intelligence regarding the conflict in Ukraine.
A law enforcement source has confirmed that Teixeira will make his initial court appearance in Boston federal court on Friday.
As of now, the federal court system does not have any charging paperwork pertaining to the case.
The FBI declared in a statement that it has “aggressively pursued investigation leads” into the breach since late last week.
Teixeira’s capture “exemplifies our sustained commitment to identifying, prosecuting, and holding accountable those who betray our country’s confidence and put our national security at danger,” the FBI stated.
After Teixeira’s leadership of an online chat group on Discord, where the hacked data were uploaded, was revealed, Teixeira was detained, according to U.S. media outlets.
According to a member of the Discord group, who was quoted in a Wednesday article by The Washington Post, the leaker was another group member who had claimed to work at a military installation.
According to The Post, it conducted an interview with a Discord group member and obtained information that was confirmed by another group member.
The member of the Discord group who leaked the material said to the newspaper that while the leaker was not opposed to the American government, he had claimed that the country’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were working to oppress citizens and withhold information from them.
According to the group member, the leaker initially supplied typewritten intelligence reports before switching to sharing photographs of documents.
According to the study, the leaker stopped disseminating those photos in mid-March, a few weeks after another Discord group participant shared a number of the documents on another Discord server, creating a channel for further distribution.
Former Justice Department and White House national security adviser Jordan Strauss claimed that American investigators pursued the case with particular urgency because it had “quite fresh and perhaps ongoing intelligence” concerning the fighting in Ukraine.
According to Strauss, who is currently a managing director at Kroll, “there would be enormous urgency to discover the leaker since he probably had recent or continuous access to information this sensitive,” not just to punish him but also to stop the leak.
President Joseph Biden said he wasn’t overly concerned about the security breech, which may be the most significant leak in a decade, when speaking to reporters in Ireland.
Although Biden expressed concern that it occurred, he said that he was not aware of any contemporaneous events that were particularly significant.
This report used The Associated Press for some of its information. This report also included contributions from VOA national security correspondent Jeff Seldin.
