Pentagon leaker Jack Teixeira was sentenced to 15 years in prison for leaking military secrets online

Former Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years in prison for stealing classified information from the Department of Defense and sharing it online, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts said.

Teixeira’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Teixeira apologized, according to NBC affiliate WJAR’s coverage of the U.S. District Court hearing in Providence, Rhode Island.

“The entire responsibility lies on my shoulders,” Teixeira said. “And I accept whatever that may bring.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office argued for a prison sentence of 200 months, or about 17 years, the maximum under an agreement between Teixeira and federal prosecutors.

According to WJAR, Judge Indira Talwani found that the document leaks came after extensive training that covered the consequences of leaks and after Teixeira was warned about the way he handled classified material.

“Yet you posted hundreds of documents online over the course of a year,” she said.

Teixeira’s lawyers argued for a sentence at the lower end of the range, pointing out that the maximum sentence of 200 months would be more than the government is seeking against Julian Assange, who is accused of publishing a trove of secret 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 intentionally storing and disclosing 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 Tuesday’s verdict, Jodi Cohen, the 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 news conference after the verdict that Teixeira posted classified information online almost daily for more than a year. “He passed it on to our adversaries and allies around the world,” she said.

Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua S. Levy said Teixeira’s crimes put U.S. personnel abroad at deadly risk, damaged relations with allies and may have exposed some of the ways the country collects such material.

“He leaked information that the government believed was likely to cause serious harm to the United States,” he said at the news conference.

Among the documents disclosed was information about troop movements, he said.

According to court documents, Teixeira transcribed secret documents that he then shared on Discord, a social media platform primarily used by online gamers. He began sharing the documents around 2022, in part to impress colleagues on the platform, prosecutors alleged.

One document he was accused of leaking contained information about the supply of equipment to Ukraine, while another document contained discussions about a foreign adversary’s plot to attack American forces abroad, prosecutors said.

Teixeira enlisted in the Air National Guard in 2019 and was an airman first class. He was stationed at Otis Air National Guard Base, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he was assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing as a cyber transportation systems journeyman.

He was able to access the documents because he had had a security clearance for top secret information since about July 2021 and had received training in the definition of classified information, classification levels and how to properly handle the material, the indictment says.

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 considering such a leak. “The judge recognized the seriousness of this conduct and the lasting nature of the harm,” he said.

While the verdict closed a chapter of the case, Levy argued that the harm caused by the defendant would continue to resonate.

“We won’t know the full extent of Jack Teixeira’s damage for several years,” he said.