Jack Texeira was a ticking time bomb
He appears to be one of those heavily armed, racist, incels with a propensity for grandiosity and violence. How in the hell did he get that top security clearance?
Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of posting classified documents online, repeatedly tried to obstruct federal investigators and has a “troubling” history of making racist and violent remarks, Justice Department lawyers said in a court filing late Wednesday.
In an 18-page memo, released before a detention hearing scheduled for Thursday in a Massachusetts federal court, the department’s lawyers argued that Airman Teixeira needed to be detained indefinitely because he posed a “serious flight risk” and might still have information that would be of “tremendous value to hostile nation states.”
Airman Teixeira tapped into vast reservoirs of sensitive information, an amount that “far exceeds what has been publicly disclosed” so far, they wrote.
Prosecutors pointedly questioned Airman Teixeira’s overall state of mind, disclosing that he was suspended from high school in 2018 for alarming comments about the use of Molotov cocktails and other weapons, and trawled the internet for information about mass shootings. He engaged in “regular discussions about violence and murder” on the same social media platform, Discord, that he used to post classified information, the filing said, and he surrounded his bed at his parents’ house with firearms and tactical gear.
Airman Teixeira was also prone to making “racial threats,” prosecutors said.
This behavior — so disturbing it was flagged by local police when he applied for a firearms identification card — is certain to raise new questions about how Airman Teixeira obtained a top-secret security clearance that gave him access to some of the country’s most sensitive intelligence reports.
Mr. Teixeira’s court-appointed lawyers dismissed the claim that he would be in a flight risk, and proposed that he be released on a $20,000 bond to his family’s custody, in a response filed several hours before the hearing.
The episode in high school took place during his sophomore year and was never repeated, they said. The lawyers also played down the idea that he would have an opportunity to turn information over to the United States’ enemies.
The government provided “little more than speculation that a foreign adversary will seduce Mr. Teixeira and orchestrate his clandestine escape from the United States,” they wrote.
His legal team also offered a fleeting first glimpse at possible defense arguments, claiming that the government has not offered proof Mr. Teixeira ever intended for the information posted to a private social media server “to be widely disseminated.”
Mr. Teixeira’s lawyers described him as compliant — and said he sat on the porch reading a Bible as he waited to be arrested — but the government painted a starkly different picture.
In arguing for his confinement, prosecutors described a panicked effort by Airman Teixeira to cover up his actions as law enforcement closed in, including telling a member of a chat group to “delete all messages,” and instructing a user to stonewall investigators.
He also tried to destroy evidence, prosecutors said. The filing includes a series of photos of electronic equipment, including a tablet and an Xbox console, that he hurriedly smashed, then tossed in a dumpster near his home in North Dighton, Mass., before his arrest this month. A witness told the government that he threw his phone out the window of his truck as he was driving.
“These efforts appeared calculated to delay or prevent the government from gaining a full understanding of the seriousness and scale of his conduct,” the department wrote. “Any promise by the defendant to stay home or to refrain from compounding the harm that he has already caused is worth no more than his broken promises to protect classified national defense information.”
I don’t know if he’s in danger of defecting or whatever they think but he’s not a normal person and it’s probably a good idea to keep him under lock and key until his case is decided. He’s very weird, he likes guns and he liked to google mass shootings. Any one of those things might not mean anything but combine that with the illegal behavior online and his need to lead a strange little crew of misfits, and it just seems wise to keep him under wraps.