Former Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years for stealing classified information from the Defense Department and sharing it online, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts announced.
Attorneys for Teixeira didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Teixeira apologized, according to coverage of the hearing in U.S. District Court by NBC affiliate WJAR of Providence, Rhode Island.
“All of the responsibility falls on my shoulders,” Teixeira said. “And I accept what that may bring.”
The U.S. attorney’s office argued for a 200-month sentence, or roughly 17 years, the maximum under an agreement between Teixeira and federal prosecutors.
Judge Indira Talwani noted the document leak happened after extensive training that covered the consequences for leaks and after Teixeira was warned about the way he handled classified material, according to WJAR.
“Despite that, you posted on the internet hundreds of documents over the period of a year,” she said.
Teixeira’s attorneys argued for a sentence on the low end of the range, noting that the maximum of 200 months would be more than the government sought against Julian Assange, who is accused of publishing a trove of classified documents.
They argued that Teixeira’s autism and isolation during the pandemic contributed to his behavior.
In March, Teixeira pleaded guilty to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act. The plea was part of the agreement, which included a recommended sentence of 11 to 17 years. He was arrested by the FBI in North Dighton, Massachusetts, in April 2023 and has been in federal custody since mid-May 2023.
After sentencing Tuesday, Jodi Cohen, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, described Teixeira as “one of the most prolific leakers of classified information in American history.”
Cohen said at a post-sentencing news conference that Teixeira put classified information online almost every day for more than a year. “He transmitted it to our adversaries and our allies across the world,” she said.
Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua S. Levy said Teixeira’s crimes put U.S. personnel abroad at mortal risk and damaged relationships with allies and may have revealed some of the ways the country gathers such material.
“He leaked information that the government determined was likely to cause grave damage to the United States,” he said at the news conference.
Among the exposed documents was information about troop movements, he said.
According to court documents, Teixeira transcribed classified documents that he then shared on Discord, a social media platform used mostly by online gamers. He began sharing the documents in or around 2022, in part to impress peers on the platform, prosecutors alleged.
A document he was accused of leaking included information about providing equipment to Ukraine, while another included discussions about a foreign adversary’s plot to target American forces abroad, prosecutors said.
Teixeira entered the Air National Guard in 2019 and was an airman first class. He was based at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he was assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing as a cyber transport systems journeyman.
He was able to access the documents because he held a top-secret security clearance since around July 2021 and had received training in the definition of classified information, classification levels and proper handling of the material, according to the indictment.
While the documents were discovered online in March 2023, Teixeira had been sharing them online for more than a year, prosecutors said.
Levy said the sentence could serve as a warning to anyone pondering such a leak. “The judge recognized the gravity of this conduct and the enduring nature of the harm,” he said.
While sentencing closed a chapter of the case, Levy argued wreckage caused by the defendant will continue to resonate.
“We won’t know the full extent of Jack Teixeira’s damage for several years,” he said.
Rebecca Shabad
and
Zoë Richards
contributed
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