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.