FBI agents yesterday arrested 21-year-old Jack Douglas Teixeira, an employee of the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s intelligence wing, as the prime suspect in the social media leak of hundreds of documents secrets of the Pentagon and US spy agencies; a leak that drove Joe Biden’s Government crazy.
The feds arrested Teixeira “without incident” in a house in North Dighton (Massachusetts). They did so under the multiple accusation of “unauthorized theft, retention and transmission of classified defense information”, according to the Attorney General and Secretary of Justice, Merrick Garland. The detainee was taken to the Federal District Court of Massachusetts for his arrest to be processed. The investigation is “ongoing,” Garland stressed,
Teixeira led the small gaming chat group on the Discord internet space, where the papers, which largely referred to the war in Ukraine, began to leak weeks ago, before spreading a few days ago on Twitter and Telegram.
Specifically, Teixeira oversaw a private online group called Thug Shaker Central in which about 20 to 30 people, mostly very young men, had joined together to share their taste for guns, racist memes and video games.
These reports that Teixeria allegedly leaked contained material from the major defense and espionage agencies and departments of the first power, including the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Office of Director of National Intelligence.
They contain documents and images with war plans and maps of situations of the Russian and Ukrainian forces; they recount previously unknown episodes of the dispute, such as a “near miss” in which a Russian fighter jet nearly shot down a British spy plane, and expose compromising findings from Washington about partners such as Israel ( Mossad support for protests against the Government) or Egypt (Government plans to deliver rockets to the Russians).
In view of the possible damage that the publication of the records could mean for the war strategy of Ukraine and its allies, as well as for the general work of the intelligence of the United States and the cohesion with its partners , Pentagon spokespersons had expressed in recent days their “alarm” and concern for the “serious risks” that the leaks represented for national security.
However, President Joe Biden took iron out of the matter yesterday. “I’m not worried about the leak,” he said. “I am concerned about the fact that it happened. But there is nothing current, as far as I know, that is of great importance.” The president announced several hours in advance that the investigators were “close” to catching the suspect.
Many report the enormous fatigue of the Russian army and the serious mistakes that would explain its stagnation in the invasion of the neighboring country.
A new batch of papers that The New York Times published yesterday hours before Teixeira’s arrest recounts a strong row between the Russian spy services and the country’s Ministry of Defense over the number of casualties at the front. The Federal Security Service (FSB) accuses Defense of lowering and “obfuscating” the figures. There is “continued resistance by military officers to convey bad news up the chain of command,” US spies reported as a result of their probes into the Kremlin.
This leak attributed to a 21-year-old in an online gaming chat is the biggest leak of official secrets since the Wikileaks case ten years ago. And no one disputes that, beyond the damage it causes, it represents an embarrassment for the Government of what is considered the most powerful country on the planet.
