The former Massachusetts Air National Guardsman charged with leaking army secrets and techniques to members of an internet gaming group intends to plead responsible.
“The defendant respectfully requests that the Court schedule this matter for a Rule 11 hearing on March 4, 2024, the date currently set for the Pretrial Conference,” reads the movement filed within the case of Jack Teixeira Thursday afternoon.
A Rule 11 listening to in federal legislation is a change of plea listening to. Teixeira, of North Dighton, had beforehand pleaded not responsible to the six counts of willful retention and transmission of nationwide protection info. There was no additional info obtainable Thursday.
Teixeira, 22, was arrested final April on a number of counts of unauthorized retention and transmission of nationwide protection info and unauthorized removing and retention of categorized paperwork or materials. A federal grand jury indicted him on the costs, which carry a potential 15-year jail sentence, final June.
U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge David H. Hennessy ordered him detained forward of trial and maintained that order regardless of a flurry of appeals from protection attorneys.
Prosecutors accuse Teixeira of abusing his safety clearance as a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman to share greater than 40 photographs of categorized paperwork largely concerning the struggle in Ukraine to the roughly 50 members of a Discord server he led. A “server” is what the gaming-dominated social media platform Discord calls particular person teams or boards.
Specifically, Teixeira is accused of sharing info on Russia’s struggle in Ukraine, together with troop actions, in addition to different matters on a server he led referred to as “Thug Shaker Central” that had about 50 members.
Teixeira had joined the Air National Guard in September 2019, in keeping with charging paperwork, and served on a base at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod as an IT specialist — a job formally referred to as a “cyber defense operations journeyman.” He rose to the E-3 rank in May 2022.
This position allowed him to see paperwork he wasn’t in any other case aware about — particularly after he was granted Top Secret clearance with entry to Sensitive Compartmented Information, in 2021, following a required 8- to 15-month approval course of, in keeping with the U.S. General Services Administration. Prosecutors allege he first started typing out info he had discovered however then, in January 2023, started posting pictures of supplies stamped SECRET and TOP SECRET.
“I know that to acquire his security clearance, Teixeira would have signed a lifetime binding non-disclosure agreement in which he would have had to acknowledge that the unauthorized disclosure of protected information could result in criminal charges,” an FBI agent wrote in an affidavit in help of the preliminary arrest and fees.
The leaked paperwork had an almost instantaneous impact, in keeping with a number of stories, together with U.S. intelligence evaluation of Taiwan’s air defenses that present it could possibly be weak to an assault by China.
And it had fast ramifications for the army.
Just days after Teixeira’s arrest, the Pentagon stated it was revoking entry to delicate info for a lot of members and doing an overhaul on its info insurance policies.
Then got here others on the Air National Guard 102nd Intelligence Wing on the Otis base, the place it later got here to mild that his superiors had beforehand admonished him for copying info. The Air Force confirmed to the Associated Press on April 18, 2023, that it had stripped the Wing of the intelligence duties and assigned it elsewhere.
Last December, 15 airmen on the base had been disciplined following an Air Force Inspector General investigation that discovered that Teixeira’s alleged actions had been the first explanation for the leak, there have been “also a number of contributing factors, both direct and indirect, that enabled the unauthorized disclosures to occur and continue over an extended period of time.”
The actions ranged from relieving personnel from their positions, together with command positions, to non-judicial punishment, the Herald reported then.
Prosecutors had been additionally scared of Teixeira’s psychological state throughout the time of the alleged leakage, stating in a late-April 2023 movement that he had been utilizing his work laptop to lookup mass casualty taking pictures occasions and even posting troubling messages like “I hope isis (ISIS) goes through with their attack plan and creates a massacre at the World Cup” and that he would “kill a (expletive) ton of people” to “(cull) the weak-minded.”
The case had been a sophisticated one because the proof was, clearly, nearly solely categorized authorities info.
Teixeira’s protection attorneys, Brendan Kelley and Gene Franco from the Federal Public Defender’s workplace in Boston’s Seaport district, the place the federal court docket is positioned, lacked the required safety clearance to assessment the supplies federal prosecutors had collected.
The crew made a request for the addition of a lawyer who specialised in delicate issues and Judge Hennessey allowed it. Private New York City-based lawyer Michael Backrach, whose prior instances embrace representing a Guantanamo Bay detainee, was added to the crew final summer season.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”