To support a supplemental bid to keep Jack Teixeira jailed pre-trial, prosecutors provided proof that on three instances, the young enlisted man had been caught improperly accessing classified information. Even after formal warnings on September 15 and October 27, 2022, on January 30 of this year, a female Master Sergeant observed Teixeira “viewing content that was not related to his primary duty.”
Days later, amid a discussion of “fed cars sneaking around,” Teixeira fantasized about making an “assassination van.”
Nevertheless, even after three chances to stop all this, Teixeira was still actively stealing classified information for over a month after that, and as an earlier filing laid out, he offered to take requests about “happenings that pertain to your country” after that.
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.
I suspect the non-response to these three incidents may be one reason the Commanding Officers of this base have been temporarily suspended and the entire unit stripped of its intelligence mission.
But the more important supplement for Teixeira’s ultimate fate may be this exchange from November 15.
Teixeira: I remember reading that on a TS network
…
Teixeira: I work in airforce intel
…
User: Would have been nice
User: If you alerted us that a drone was heading to crash in the middle of a suburb of our capital?
Teixeira: We did
Teixeira: Just not that simple
User: Official government statement was nobody said shit
User: And nobody saw it
Teixeira: Yeah I expect that to be the official statement
Teixeira: My gov would have done the same downplay strategy
User: What is a ts network
Teixeira: Top secret
…
Teixeira: Like SCI noforn, hcs
…
User: What is being said now about this loose ukrainian missile?
Teixeira: I mean I’m hoping to get back to work in the next week rn I have covid
Teixeira: When I do get back however I will let u know
This exchange may be a response to this incident from the same day, when a Ukrainian air defense missile attempting to shoot down an incoming Russian attack went astray and killed two Poles (though Przewodów is nowhere near Warsaw).
If that’s right, by extrapolation this interlocutor must be have been presenting as a Pole. After Teixeira stated that he worked in Air Force intel with access to a Top Secret network, his interlocutor elicited information, challenged Teixeira’s response, then probed how much access Teixeira really had. Teixeira responded by telling someone presenting as a citizen of a NATO ally that he had access to compartmented information and HUMINT. Then the supposed Pole asked for more information.
And Teixeira agreed to get it for him.
Perhaps this presumed Pole was just shooting the shit in a gamer chat room. Or perhaps this guy was something else, someone with the training to know how to coax someone into greater and greater compromise.
Perhaps there were others in the chat room who saw all this go down and exploited the situation accordingly.
This filing, as the earlier one also did, specifies that these chats do not reflect the full extent of Special Agent Luke Church’s knowledge of the situation.
The interactions described above do not reflect all my knowledge on this matter or all relevant, inculpatory, or violent messages that I observed. They are instead offered to provide the Court with representative sample of certain messages attributable to TEIXEIRA.
Church might well be withholding the full context of these exchanges, too, perhaps withholding what happened after Teixeira went back to work after recovering from COVID.
Thus far, DOJ’s filings speak just of the existing charges against Teixeira, 18 USC 793(b) and (d). But this willful sharing of HUMINT with foreigners soliciting it — whether they really are citizens of a NATO ally or something else — gets a closer to espionage, an 18 USC 794 violation of the sort that can carry life imprisonment.
Update: dc-turtle suggests the drone could have been in Croatia, not Poland (which I’ve added to the title). It would still amount to Teixeira sharing information with someone presenting as a citizen of a NATO ally.