Suspect in Discord leaks to remain in jail pending trial, judge says

WORCESTER, Mass. – An Air National Guard member charged with leaking classified material online must remain behind bars while he awaits trial, a federal magistrate ruled Friday.

U.S. magistrate judge David Hennessy ruled on the issue after weeks of back-and-forth between prosecutors and lawyers for 21-year-old Jack Teixeira over whether it was safe to release him while he awaits trial. The judge ruled shortly after a hearing on the issue began Friday afternoon.

In a court filing earlier this week, prosecutors added to their allegations against Teixeira, saying he appears to have shared sensitive secrets with foreign nationals and had raised concern among his coworkers in the months before he was charged with mishandling and disseminating national security information.

Teixeira was arrested in April after FBI agents traced back to him a collection of classified material posted in an online chat group. Authorities say he worked as an IT professional at a military base in Massachusetts’s Cape Cod, and abused his top secret clearance – illegally sharing U.S. intelligence assessments and other sensitive information with others on Discord, a social media platform popular with video game players.

One of the groups where he shared classified information had upward of 150 users, officials said, and among the members “are a number of individuals who represented that they resided in other countries” and whose accounts trace back to foreign internet addresses.

Teixeira’s “willful transmission of classified information over an extended period to more than 150 users worldwide” undermines his lawyer’s claims that he never meant for the information to be shared widely, prosecutors wrote.

The filing also shows that Teixeira was repeatedly written up by colleagues for apparently not following rules for the use of classified systems. A Sept. 15 Air Force memorandum included in the newly released court materials notes that Teixeira “had been observed taking notes on classified intelligence information” inside a room specifically designed to handle sensitive classified material.

Teixeira, the Air Force memo says, was instructed “to no longer take notes in any form on classified intelligence information.” About a month later, a memo noted that Teixeira “was potentially ignoring the cease-and-desist order” given to him in September. He was instructed to stop “any deep dives into classified intelligence information and focus on his job,” that memo said.

Then in January, a member of his unit observed Teixeira “viewing content that was not related to his primary duty and was related to the intelligence field.” That memo also noted that Teixeira “had been previously notified to focus on his own career duties and to not seek out intelligence products.”

Teixeira’s lawyer countered in court papers that prosecutors have wrongly compared his conduct to previous high-profile security breaches, when the case is more similar to lesser-known leak investigations in which defendants were released on bond.

The prosecution filing also recounts online chats in which Teixeira appears to brag about his sharing of classified information and understand the potential legal consequences of such actions.

“Knowing what happens more than pretty much anyone is cool,” the airman allegedly wrote in a chat dated mid-November. When another user suggested he write a blog about the information, Teixeira replied, “making a blog would be the equivalent of what chelsea manning did,” referring to a major classified leak case in 2010.

A member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, Teixeira has been charged with two counts: retention and transmission of national defense information and willful retention of classified documents. He faces up to 25 years in prison. As the investigation proceeds, he could face additional charges.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers had sparred over whether Teixeira should be released on bond. Federal prosecutors said he posed a security risk because he might still possess classified documents that investigators have not yet found, and foreign governments could try to recruit him to find out what he knows.

Teixeira’s lawyer, Brendan Kelley, has said that with careful monitoring Teixeira could safely go home – arguing that authorities have inflated the flight risk of a young man who still lives with his parents in the community where he grew up.

Hennessy, the judge, pushed back on suggestions from Teixeira’s attorney, who claimed his client only meant to share the information with a small group of online friends, not the wider world.

“The defendant put top-secret information on the internet, and your argument is that he had no idea that it would go anywhere beyond the server,” Hennessy said at a hearing last month. “I find it a little incredible that the defendant could not foresee that possibility.”

Prosecutors warned in an earlier court filing that Teixeira has done “immense” damage to U.S. national security, and is still capable of causing extraordinary harm. “Detention is necessary to ensure that the Defendant does not continue on his destructive and damaging path,” they wrote.

In their filings, prosecutors have said Teixeira exhibited disturbing behavior five years ago while a high school student, and was suspended after a classmate overheard him talking about weapons, “including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats.”

More recently, according to prosecutors, Teixeira posted comments online about conducting a mass shooting, including in November when he wrote in a social media post that if he had his way, he would “kill a … [expletive] ton of people,” which he said would be “culling the weak minded.” In previous court filings, prosecutors also shared photos of what they characterized as an “arsenal” of weapons found in his home.

Teixeira’s lawyer has said the talk of an arsenal was overheated – because the guns in court images that had been thought to be in his room are not real weapons, but airsoft guns that shoot small plastic pellets. The firearms in Teixeira’s house are locked away in a cabinet, according to Kelley.

Prosecutors say there also is evidence that, as the leak investigation progressed, Teixeira may have destroyed evidence of his crimes and told others not to talk to authorities. Earlier this month, Teixeira allegedly told an online friend: “If anyone comes looking, don’t tell them” anything, and encouraged that person to “delete all messages.”

Teixeira’s attorneys have pushed back against those claims, saying Teixeira was peacefully reading a Bible when agents came to arrest him, and that prosecutors’ notions of the risks to national security are far-fetched and fanciful.

The prosecution, Teixeira’s lawyer Allen Franco wrote in a court filing last month, has engaged in “hyperbolic judgments and provides little more than speculation that a foreign adversary will seduce Mr. Teixeira and orchestrate his clandestine escape from the United States. This argument is illusory. The government has presented no articulable facts to support these assertions.”