Former US National Guard Airman Jack Teixeira was sentenced today to 15 years behind bars for publishing classified military documents on the Internet, which were related to, among other things, the war in Ukraine.
Federal judge Indira Talwani decided on the amount of the sentence in Boston.
Teixeira, now 22, agreed to plead guilty in March to all six counts of knowingly retaining and transmitting classified documents related to the U.S. military. He has been in custody since his arrest in April last year.
The case is being described as one of the most serious security breaches in the US since more than 700,000 documents, videos and diplomatic reports appeared on the WikiLeaks website in 2010. The US Air Force has already punished 15 of its employees in connection with the case.
Prior to his arrest, Teixeira served in the Air Force Branch of the Guard in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he worked in cyber security and IT support. Although he did not have a high rank, he had a security clearance for access to top secret documents. From January 2022, according to the prosecutor’s office, he began to open hundreds of classified documents that related, among other things, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Teixeira then shared the classified information through the chat app Discord in closed groups, boasting that he had access to information on “Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iran and China,” according to prosecutors. However, some of the materials, which contained top secret information about Ukrainian air defense or the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, began to spread further. According to the prosecutor’s office, Teixeira disclosed the information despite the fact that his superiors reprimanded and warned him twice in 2022 regarding his handling of classified documents.
Teixeira’s lawyers said in court documents that the accused “sincerely regrets the decisions he has made and the harm he has caused”. They demanded a shorter sentence of 11 years in prison. They said the autistic, isolated youth’s intention was never to harm the United States, but to educate friends he found on the Internet about world events, including the war in Ukraine.
Prosecutors, on the other hand, argued that Teixeira does not have a mental disability that would prevent him from recognizing what is right and what is wrong. At the same time, they questioned the relevance of the diagnosis, which was made only after the arrest, and according to which the young man has “mild high-functioning autism”.
Source: spravy.pravda.sk
