Attorney General Merrick Garland said Teixeira, an Air National Guardsman, was arrested in connection to the “unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission” of classified information and will have an initial appearance before the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts.
Teixeira was an Airman First Class with the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.
Pentagon press secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder declined to comment on specifics of the matter, but more broadly called the leak a “deliberate, criminal act” in violation of rules and procedures.
“You’re expected to abide by those rules, regulations and responsibility. It’s called military discipline,” he said at a briefing. “And in certain cases, especially when it comes to sensitive information, it also is about the law.”
Since leaking into the broader public sphere last week, the documents have captured the attention of the world as they detail the affairs of U.S. allied countries and the war in Ukraine.
Teixeira reportedly led an online group where the documents were first posted, though it’s unclear how the highly sensitive information was first obtained.
On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported on an unidentified person who led a Discord server chat group and claimed he worked at a military base with access to a secure facility.
The Post, which spoke to members of the Discord group, said the person was referred to as “OG,” and he allegedly shared military secrets on the server since 2020, most of them hand-written transcriptions.
Toward the end of last year, OG began sharing pictures of classified material, which eventually spilled over to the rest of the internet around March.
The New York Times reported the leader of that Discord group was Teixeira, just hours before he was arrested by the FBI.
The document leaks have underscored what may be a “systemic weakness” in the Pentagon, said Michael Butler, a professor of political science at Clark University who specializes in foreign policy and security studies.
“Information is highly decentralized [and] can be moved very easily and quickly at no cost,” Butler said, adding there is the potential for bad actors to “exploit vulnerabilities in the system before the Department of Defense or intelligence agencies can close them again.”
Read more coverage of the Pentagon document leaks at TheHill.com.
