A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced former Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira to 15 years in prison for sharing top-secret information about the war in Ukraine with a group of disaffected gamers.
The FBI arrested Teixeira, then 21, in 2023 and accused him of using his top-secret security clearance to access classified material and post transcriptions and pictures of the documents on a Discord server. He later pleaded guilty to six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information.
The case raised embarrassing questions for the Air National Guard about how a junior officer with a history of violent comments—including discussing guns, Molotov cocktails, and making racial threats at school—had access to such sensitive information. The first media reports about classified documents appearing on Discord took intelligence officials by surprise, and a spokesperson for the National Security Council told the New York Times, “We don’t know what the motive is. We don’t know what else might be out there.”
The Times later reported that members of one Discord server where Teixeira posted the classified documents, called Thug Shaker Central, said Teixeira wanted to teach the other war game-loving posters what war was actually like and shared hundreds of documents, including battlefield maps from Ukraine.
Department of Justice officials said that Teixeira obtained the documents from a classified workstation at the Otis U.S. Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts and that some of the pictures he posted of the documents included marks labeling them “SECRET” and “TOP SECRET.”
An inspector general investigation conducted after the arrest found that the Air Force had missed or failed to react to a number of signs that Teixeira was improperly using his security clearance. On several occasions members of his unit reported Teixeira for viewing information he didn’t need, but the complaints weren’t properly documented or acted upon even after supervisors had ordered him to stop doing intelligence “deep dives,” according to the investigation report.
“Three individuals in A1C Teixeira’s supervisory chain had information about as many as four separate instances of security incidents and potential insider threat indicators they were required to report,” the inspector general concluded. “Had any of these three members come forward and properly disclosed the information they held at the time of the incidents, the length and depth of the unauthorized disclosures may have been reduced by several
months.”
The Air National Guard disciplined more than a dozen service members following the inspector general investigation, including Col. Sean Riley, who was removed from command of the 102nd Intelligence Wing.
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