Prosecutors say alleged leaker is a ‘serious flight risk’ who sought to destroy evidence
Mike Brest
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The Department of Justice believes Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking hundreds of classified documents, should remain detained as he awaits trial because he’s a “serious flight risk.”
Prosecutors argued that he has an incentive to flee, and nations hostile to the United States would have reasons to offer him safe harbor, in a motion for pretrial detention posted Wednesday night, which outlines their intended arguments in Teixeira’s detention hearing set for Thursday afternoon.
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“In the first place, the Defendant poses a serious flight risk,” the prosecutors said. “He currently faces 25 years in prison — and potentially far more — and other serious consequences for his conduct; the evidence against him is substantial and mounting; the charged conduct would very obviously end his military career; and he accessed and may still have access to a trove of classified information that would be of tremendous value to hostile nation states that could offer him safe harbor and attempt to facilitate his escape from the United States.”
“No condition or combination of conditions will reasonably ensure that the Defendant does not flee, and that the Defendant would not take further steps to obstruct justice, including through the destruction of evidence or other action that would further endanger the U.S. national security or the physical safety of his community,” the prosecutors continued.
Teixeira was charged earlier this month under the Espionage Act with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material.
Prosecutors, in the motion, accused Teixeira, who was a part of the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts, of supposedly destroying evidence and encouraging others to do the same.
When law enforcement officers searched a nearby dumpster after his arrest, they discovered a tablet, a laptop, an iPhone box for a new phone, and an Xbox gaming console, all of which had been smashed, per the motion. He supposedly informed colleagues two days before his arrest that he had a new phone number and email address.
He allegedly leaked the documents on a Discord channel of 20-30 members who were of similar age, and he supposedly told them to “delete all messages” and “If anyone comes looking, don’t tell them shit.”
“These efforts appeared calculated to delay or prevent the government from gaining a full understanding of the seriousness and scale of his conduct,” the motion said. “Any promise by the Defendant to stay home or to refrain from compounding the harm that he has already caused is worth no more than his broken promises to protect classified national defense information.”
The motion includes messages sent between Teixeira and his friends on the platform:
User: Isn[‘]t that shit classified User: ? TEIXEIRA: everything that [I’]ve been telling [you] guys up to this point has been [laugh out loud] TEIXEIRA: this isn[‘]t different User: Well User: You [really] trust everyone here then TEIXEIRA: [I] have plausible deniability and non[e] of them know anything incriminating about me TEIXEIRA: no one has a point of contact to my work TEIXEIRA: no one knows where [I] work TEIXEIRA: and no one knows how to identify me TEIXEIRA: [Don’t worry] [I’]ve thought of that
Back when Teixeira was in high school, he was suspended when a classmate overheard him reference weapons, “including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats.” The incident led the local police department to deny his firearms identification card application in 2018 and again in 2019.
Prosecutors alleged that Teixeira said on social media in recent months that he would “kill a [expletive] ton of people,” and it’d be “culling the weak-minded”; and that he was tempted to make a minivan into an “assassination van” in February 2022. In March of this year, he described SUVs as “mobile gun trucks” and “[o]ff-road and good assassination vehicles.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The commander and the detachment commander overseeing administrative support of Teixeira’s unit have both been temporarily suspended amid the fallout of the extraordinary leaks, Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokeswoman, told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday.
The hundreds of documents Teixeira’s accused of releasing rocked the U.S. intelligence community as news outlets reported on the contents of the documents that were not meant for public consumption. Many provided snapshots of the status of the war in Ukraine, while others revealed the extent of the U.S. intelligence community’s spying on both allies and adversaries.