A 21-year-old member of the US Air Force National Guard has been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in connection with the leak of classified United States military intelligence documents. Jack Teixeira was taken into custody “without incident”, according to Attorney General Merrick Garland. The Pentagon is still assessing the scale and scope of the leak, which appears to relate to information about the war in Ukraine and US allies. Some of the documents have been doctored and may be used in disinformation campaigns, officials have warned.
Teixeira was a member of the intelligence wing of the state national guard, according to The New York Times. He joined the Air National Guard in September 2019 and his official job title was “cyber transport systems journeyman”. The role involves maintaining the underlying infrastructure of the Air Force’s “vast, global communications network”. Teixeira was identified as the leader of a small gaming chat group on the Discord platform where the leaked documents first emerged.
The chat group, which formed in 2020, bonded over their love of guns, military gear and religion. Membership was by invitation only. Teixeira was considered the group’s leader and was widely admired for his bravado. Members said he would post videos of himself at a gun range, including one where he uttered racial and anti-Semitic slurs before opening fire. Offensive jokes and memes were common on the site.
At some point last year, members told The Washington Post, Teixeira began posting what appeared to be re-written transcripts of classified information, which he touted as available through his work. The transcriptions included definitions of military jargon and other annotations. He regularly lectured the group on the importance of staying abreast of current affairs and appeared to post the transcribed intelligence to inform other members. Teixeira later switched to posting photos of the documents, although a timeline of when that began was not immediately clear.
The classified materials gradually made their way to other sites, including the imageboard 4Chan, as well as to more mainstream social media platforms. Discord has said it is cooperating with investigators. US media began widely reporting on the leak last week, sending the administration of President Joe Biden scrambling to contain the fallout from the documents, which showed vulnerabilities in Ukraine’s air defence capabilities and exposed private assessments by allies on an array of intelligence matters.
The documents have also roiled close US allies. Some appeared to show that Egypt planned to sell weapons to Russia, in a deal it planned to keep secret from Washington. Another seemingly showed that Russian operatives were building a closer relationship with the United Arab Emirates, while a third document indicated that South Korean leaders were hesitant to ship artillery shells to Ukraine. The governments involved in those claims have all denied the information in the documents.
Biden told reporters earlier this week that he was “not concerned about the leak”, but added that he was concerned that it had happened. He said there was “nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that is of great consequence”. Department of Defense spokesperson Pat Ryder said his agency would not address specifics of the leaked documents, as they had not been officially declassified. “We’re just not going to discuss or confirm classified information due to the potential impact on national security, as well as the safety and security of our personnel, and those of our allies and our partners,” he said.