Jack Teixeira, alleged Pentagon leaker, to plead guilty

Jack Teixeira, the former member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard charged with leaking hundreds of highly classified military and intelligence documents, intends to plead guilty, according two sources familiar with the matter and court filings.

Teixeira is scheduled to enter the plea during a court hearing in federal court in Boston on Monday. The court’s calendar now includes what’s known as a Rule 11 hearing, where a judge reviews whether a guilty plea is voluntary and adequate. Teixeira’s attorney declined to comment on Thursday.

He has been detained since his arrest last April, several weeks after the sensitive documents began circulating online.

Investigators said in previous court documents that Teixeira used his position as a systems administrator in the 102nd Intelligence Wing in the Massachusetts Air National Guard to obtain and then illegally disseminate classified military information on the online messaging platform Discord.

A federal grand jury indicted him on six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information in June 2023. He initially pleaded not guilty. It was not immediately clear what charge or charges he will now plead guilty to.

The classified documents covered a number of subjects, but some of the most revelatory were documents about Russia and Ukraine that disclosed troop movements, as well as a timeline for Western deliveries of weapons to Ukraine. 

Prosecutors say in some instances, Teixeira transcribed the information he was leaking, and in other instances, posted photographs of the documents.

In arguing for Teixeira’s pretrial detention in April, prosecutors alleged that he sent more than 40,000 messages on Discord between Nov. 1, 2022, and April 7, 2023, some of which contained sensitive government records. He allegedly began accessing the classified information in February 2022 and later posted the information online. 

The Air Force ultimately took action against 15 individuals for “dereliction in the performance of duties” after the service’s inspector general found that Teixeira’s unit failed to take proper action after at least four separate security incidents.  The report concluded that Teixeira alone was responsible for the leaks, but members of his unit “enabled” the disclosures by not properly supervising his access to classified information. 

Eleanor Watson contributed reporting.