MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

FBI arrests suspect of classified data leak

Teixeira is said to have committed the crime to impress people with whom he played video games online

A 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman identified as Jack Douglas Teixeira has been arrested Thursday by the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) for his alleged involvement in the leak of classified Pentagon documents. According to local media, the motivation was to impress young people with whom he played video games.

“Today, the Department of Justice arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira in connection with an investigation into the alleged unauthorized extraction, retention, and transmission of classified material information relating to national defense,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said. He added that FBI agents detained Teixeira “without incident” and that he is scheduled to appear before a federal court judge in Massachusetts shortly. So far, the charges against the defendant have not been made public and, according to Garland, the investigation is still ongoing.

US President Joseph Biden, visiting Dublin, had already said that the Justice Department was “close” to learning more about the leak of Pentagon and intelligence community documents while minimizing the damage resulting from the leak.

As per The Washington Post, Teixeira published the documents because he wanted to impress other young people he played with on the Discord platform. The suspect would have accessed the documents at the National Guard base where he worked, taken them home, and posted them on Discord.

Subsequently, those documents were disseminated through other social networks, such as Telegram, and ended up in recent days on the front pages of major newspapers worldwide.

Military biographical information for Teixeira obtained by NBC News shows that he holds the rank of airman first class. He joined the Air National Guard in September 2019 and has been based at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod.

The documents detail topics such as military supplies to Ukraine, American assessments of Israel's political situation, and analyses of factors arising on the Korean peninsula.