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- U.S. Magistrate Judge David Hennessy postpones Teixeira’s detention hearing.
- Teixeira’s lawyers asked for more time to respond to prosecutors’ request for detention.
BOSTON – A federal magistrate judge postponed a hearing Wednesday to determine whether to hold Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman charged with leaking classified Pentagon documents about the war in Ukraine, while he awaits trial.
U.S. District Magistrate Judge David Hennessy ordered a delay of about two weeks for the hearing, to allow Teixeira’s defense lawyers more time to respond to the government’s request for him to remain detained.
Teixeira, 21, was arrested Friday and charged with gathering national defense documents and unauthorized removal of classified documents. FBI agents tracked him down through the social media site Discord, where top secret documents were posted for months.
The FBI had been investigating the unauthorized posting of dozens of images of classified documents, many of which were marked “top secret,” on a variety of internet sites. Some of the documents were used during Pentagon briefings of military leaders and civilian officials.
Teixeira accessed one of the documents in February 2023, about one day before it was posted on the internet, according to the FBI.
How is the military responding?
The Air Force is investigating how a lone airman could access and distribute possibly hundreds of highly classified documents, department leaders said Tuesday.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told a Senate panel he directed the department’s inspector general to scrutinize the Air National Guard 102nd Intelligence Wing based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where Teixeira served, for “anything associated with this leak that could have gone wrong.”
The leaks raised questions about how a single airman could have removed so many documents without being detected, why there were not safety checks in place and how the documents could have lingered online undetected for months.
“Obviously we have to tighten up our processes and our practices to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Kendall told the said the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense.
Kendall said Teixeira “had no reason to be looking at or having possession of those documents.”
How important were the documents?
Experts view the damage from the leaked documents as more of a diplomatic or intelligence crisis for the U.S., more than a game-changer on the battlefields of Ukraine.
Defense officials were scrambling to assess the damage. One recent revelation, for example, involved an analysis in February of how Israel might begin providing lethal aid to Ukraine.
But experts said the documents are unlikely to have a meaningful impact on the war, despite the embarrassment and political cost.
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