Jack Teixeira’s February 2022 Logs
In a motion to keep Jack Teixiera jailed, the government provided more details about what an unstable nut they gave access to the US’ most sensitive secrets. While it remains to be seen whether any of Teixeira’s leaks got people killed, the government is lucky he didn’t go postal before he was caught. In high school he was suspended for making racist, violent comments.
In March 2018, while still in high school, the Defendant was suspended when a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats.
Last July, he was searching on mass killings in government holdings.
[O]n or around July 30, 2022, TEIXEIRA searched for the following terms: “Ruby Ridge”; “Las Vegas shooting”; Mandalay Bay shooting”; Buffalo tops shooting”; and “Uvalde.”
He fantasized about creating what he called an assassination van.
TEIXEIRA: To make people disappear and shit
TEIXEIRA: I’ve been tempted to buy one and make it an assassination van
User: Speaking of caravan
TEIXEIRA: Set up an ar and sniper blind
And one of his colleagues believed that he would be the first person Teixeira would shoot if he ever did go postal.
The same colleague told me that Teixeira was very quiet, but often talked about guns. He also said he believed he would be the first person Teixeira would shoot if Teixeira were to shoot anyone in the workplace.
The Air Force has suspended two commanders of the base where Teixeira worked, which seems like a sound move if there were colleagues worried that a guy with access to TS/SCI information might shoot them.
The commander of the 102nd Intelligence Support Squadron and the detachment commander overseeing administrative support have both been temporarily suspended from their leadership positions and have temporarily lost access to classified systems and information.
In a letter submitted to get a gun permit in 2020, Teixeira claimed that an incident from high school that had previously led to a denial, had been thoroughly investigated as part of his security clearance investigation.
In order to go to Tech School, I needed an adjudicated Top Secret clearance with the Government, which I have now.
The investigation was extremely thorough, and the events that happened on March 27th, 2018 at Dighton Rehoboth High School were discussed. Everything was explained to the investigator about the incident as well as police reports, school letters and any or all documents that were submitted to the investigator that were generated from this event. I was very concerned that my decisions that I made at 16 would haunt my future in serving my country in the military and am glad they did not.
If the fact that he was alarming fellow high school sophomores actually was investigated as part of his clearance process, it raises real questions why he wasn’t booted from the military, much less given clearance.
The package of materials provides more evidence that this leak started as a response to the Russian invasion. A review of Teixeira’s searches showed that many focused on the invasion.
These audit results indicated that TEIXEIRA conducted hundreds of searches on the classified network on a number of subjects, many of which related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
In March he told the server that he was going to stop giving updates on “set event,” which seems to be a reference to the war. At the same time, he offered to respond to requests “about your country.” The government says that the people with whom he shared classified information, “likely included foreign citizens.” If he got requests from foreigners and responded to them, he’ll be facing far more serious charges, on top of the multiple counts of 18 USC 793 he’s already likely to face.
TEIXEIRA: Like to thank everyone who came to the thread about the current event, going on and participated and listen to me, cover set event since it’s beginning, I was very happy and willing and enthusiastic to have covered this event for the past year and share with all of you something that not many people get to see something very few people in fact, get to see, but despite all of this, I’ve decided to stop with the updates
TEIXEIRA: If you guys do you want happenings that pertain to your country or events or politics or whatever you can DM me and I can tell you what I have, but it’s going to always be a brief summary
TEIXEIRA: I can’t promise, speed or prompt response, but I will respond to you eventually so offers on the table. If you want to take it until then I’ll still be sticking around here still be posting shit, so not going anywhere don’t worry about that.
And it’s not clear whether the government will be able to reconstruct why he started leaking classified materials when Russia invaded Ukraine.
When Teixeira was trying to get one of the guys in his server to delete his activity, he focused on February 2022.
TEIXEIRA: Whenever you get this, try to delete all my messages in civil discussions
TEIXEIRA: Especially those not in the thread User: kk
TEIXEIRA: Wait got an idea
TEIXEIRA: Give me an invite
TEIXEIRA: Then ban me and delete all messages
User: alright
User: gave you access
TEIXEIRA: Ok now do it
TEIXEIRA: It should give an option to delete all messages
User: it only goes to past 7 days
TEIXEIRA: Fuck AIr nvm
TEIXEIRA: Just find stuff from Feb 2022 in civil discussion and delete it during your free time
Ultimately, Teixiera deleted the entire server.
In or around April 2023, the server where the Government Information described in Complaint was posted ceased to exist, suggesting that the server administrator—the Defendant— deleted the server in its entirety.
The most alarming detail in the documents submitted is that the record of Teixeira’s searches of government holdings only goes back to February 26, 2022, two days after the Russian invasion started.
On April 17,2023, I observed an audit conducted by a subject matter expert affiliated with u.S. Government Agency 2 for all searches TEIXEIRA conducted across an Intelligence Community-wide system for which U.S. Government Agency 2 acts as a service provider. The audit yielded results dating back to February 26, 2022.
So FBI only got Discord chats going back to November 1 (though it’s unclear whether this reflects a narrow limit from an initial warrant or retention policies by Discord). The server in question was deleted. The logs for government searches stop before the invasion. And Texiera attempted to destroy all his devices.
The FBI will be able to reverse engineer some of these attempts to destroy evidence. But it’s not entirely clear they’ll be able to reconstruct what happened in February 2022 to lead Teixeira to start spilling the nation’s secrets.
Fascinating stuff. It’s shocking that he was ever given a TS security clearance. We’ve been down this road before. The government should do better.
Just noting that the DATE on that “letter submitted to get a gun permit in 2020” is 11/15/20.
I tweeted that out. Do you want a hat tip?
Oh! Thanks! …but no…it’s enough to know you thought it worth tweeting!
First, I would like to heartily concur with your statement that:
“If the fact that he was alarming fellow high school sophomores actually was investigated as part of his clearance process, it raises real questions why he wasn’t booted from the military, much less given clearance.”
Second, I think this is the most damning thing:
“If you guys do you want happenings that pertain to your country or events or politics or whatever you can DM me and I can tell you what I have”
I will be very surprised if we don’t eventually learn that this was a classic spying operation by foreign intelligence assets to schmooze a dope by fluffing up his ego.
He should have received training to prevent this kind of thing. Although, he should never have been in this position in the first place.
I can’t help wondering whether the leadership at Otis was suspended because they were pals with the step-dad and chose to overlook the youngster’s problematic past as a favor.
I wouldn’t rule that out but it’s a painful truth that when we dig into root causes of systemic failures the only thing to be found is apathy, inertia, and a passive form of “can’t happen here” overconfidence.
I wish I had a real answer to how Teixeira got his clearance. Perhaps the USAF has recruitment and retention issues (they’re not alone in this). The overhaul is long overdue given the risks now from PRC and Russia.
I too have worried for some time about how low level and enlisted personnel in the National Guard and military reserves get TS clearances. For over six years now I’ve said that the only thing keeping us from a successful coup is the military high command. Ever since the end of the draft and the beginning of the “professional” army I have worried that there is no way we can ever significantly reduce overall military spending now that the “boots on the ground” are hand picked and paid off. Now, after 50 years of cultivating and training the bottom of the barrel and indoctrinating them, the military high command is beginning to realize that they have lost control of their own troops and the infrastructure that command has always controlled. Rumsfeld’s dream has come true. With the unmasking of the Flynn brothers we are REALLY screwed if we ever want to step down from the permanent wartime military and it’s huge expense.
Color me naive, but I would have thought that, in an Army supposedly alert to right wing radicalization, a search on a classified network for “Ruby Ridge,” would have set off all sorts of alarm bells.
You’re probably a bit naïve. The US military is a massive collection of IT cobbled together over time and across budgets; some of it has surely been tacked on in ways which support gatekeeping by internal power fiefdoms.
Because Texeira is an Air National Guard airman, I’m sure you also didn’t mean Army but Air Force which has been pervasively riddled with white supremacists/nationalists. Just as the GOP resisted the first Black president doing little more than that while he was in office, the Air Force has likely stymied overhaul by its current Black SecDef. It will take a generational shift before the Air Force is remediated let alone the entire DoD.
Curtis LeMay would resemble your remark. :-)
This, imo, is one of the reasons why the seven year “cooling off period” for Generals to become SecDef is such a good idea. Even if Sec. Austin is great at his day-to-day job, foreign relationships, whatever, can he really be relied on to shake up complacency at senior levels? Sometimes changing organizational culture takes a couple of shocks to the system in the form of high-profile firings to really focus people’s attention.
The counterargument, though, is that the ‘problem children’ embedded deeply in the military are likely to have zero respect for a civilian leader, and a civilian won’t know enough about organizational culture to know where to look for the disease.
Only a little bit naive? I understand the reality of cobbled together IT systems, technical debt, and the ever present “it should be easy to …” when it really isn’t. But I’m also reacting from the perspective of listening to Garrett Graff on the history of the extreme right and reading Jeff Sharlet on its current state. From that perspective, an interest in “Ruby Ridge” is a standalone red flag.
And, yes, of course, I meant Air Force.
Graff and Sharlet have done some good work on this.
These are folks who are charged with defending the US? Their apparent incompetence is quite alarming.
Nepotism; its a hell of a drug.
Thats what i was thnking and actually my main interest in this story.
i saw a twitter comment re. a photo of Teixeira’s room that the camo wallpaper is a Russia military pattern, not U.S. – no idea if this is accurate but if so…
I don’t think so. Google search indicates Russian camo is pixilated.
Small sample size in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t think of anyone I know who served, either in my family, work associates, friends, whatever, that would have had any interest in camo wallpaper. That’s some next-level wannabe fanboy nonsense.
We have some wallpaper in our house. It’s a 6 inch wide strip along the wall beside the ceiling, with a pattern. Only wall paper we have ever installed, in the guest bedroom. Subdued but there.
Can’t imagine Milspec wall paper anywhere but a barracks. Where you are far more likely to find Milspec paint, which any dork recruit can install.
So commenting to agree with you on this.
He had a fetish for weapons, among the many weapons in a locker near his bed was a bazooka. Not your common acquisition for firearms even for the enthusiast.
Could this have been a factor in the fubar? Pushing more to the DoD in 2019 and cutting out other departments who had a role.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-04-29/pdf/2019-08797.pdf
OMG- YES!
I’ve been racking my brain, thinking about how the FBI could have screwed this background check up so badly. But Trump’s quiet 2019 transfer of this screening procedure from the FBI to the military that you link to here, means screening has been entrusted to people who, studies suggest, may be more amenable to conspiratorial thinking (see letter below) and more likely to live in a right-leaning culture that, by design, cultivates respect for authority and obedience to orders from higher ups who command respect. The FBI also has a right-leaning culture, but by necessity, it encourages and cultivates critical thinking, data gathering, and reasoned, evidence-based decision making. Screeners from the FBI would certainly be more likely to value the same in candidates for security clearance, you would think. And, it would follow that these differences in values could certainly affect how a security screener would view an airman’s high school racist remarks and gun talk.
Military culture teaches that a recruit’s written pledge not to leak is the best deterrent, because a person who respects authority will respect and honor that authority’s orders. And here, being raised in a military family would be a plus, based on the assumption that kids get plenty of practice obeying authority. Layer on top of that, an additional military training focus on loyalty to your unit, brother, comrade, etc. (so no snitching, of course) and you have a formula to potentially promote extremism, not weed it out.
Scary thought, but military security screeners may have beliefs similar, and may unknowingly favor for top secret security clearance, recruits with similar beliefs, to those expressed in this May 2021 letter signed by 124 retired military brass, who thought it necessary to warn that the “survival of our Nation and its cherished freedoms, liberty, and historic values” were now at risk because of Biden’s undermining the rule of law. The installation of the Biden Adminstration took the nation on a “hard left turn toward Socialism and a Marxist form of tyrannical government” the retired admirals and generals asserted, which now had to be countered by electing Republicans “who will always act to defend our Constitutional Republic.”
Who do you obey when the guy in the White House didn’t win the election and is taking our country toward tyranny? Perhaps they should ask that in their Security Clearance screening procedure from now on? The letter is linked in this article in The Hill.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/553088-124-retired-generals-and-admirals-question-bidens-mental-health/