Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guardsman implicated in an unlimited leak of categorised paperwork, was fixated on weapons, mass shootings, shadowy conspiracy theories — and proving he was in the suitable, and within the know.
Even as he relished the respectability and entry to intelligence he gained by means of his army service and high secret clearance, he seethed with contempt in regards to the authorities, accusing the United States of a bunch of secret, nefarious actions: making organic and chemical weapons in Ukrainian labs, creating the Islamic State, even orchestrating mass shootings.
“The FBI and other 3 letter agencies contact these unhinged mentally ill kids and convince them to do mass shootings,” Airman Teixeira, 21, wrote in a web-based chat group, sharing a debunked conspiracy principle after a gunman killed three folks at a mall in Indiana final summer season.
In messages posted on Discord, a social media platform widespread amongst avid gamers, Airman Teixeira claimed that the 20-year-old gunman behind the rampage at Greenwood Park Mall was one in every of many mass shooters groomed by the American authorities as a part of a secret plot “to make people vote for” gun management.
The posts are a part of an enormous trove of beforehand unreported chat logs obtained by The New York Times. The Discord server, completely reviewed by The Times, is one in every of at the very least two through which Airman Teixeira shared U.S. intelligence on Ukrainian readiness, battlefield instructions from the Kremlin and secret arms shipments by American allies, together with reviews of inner friction on all sides. The airman, who was charged with two counts associated to the unauthorized dealing with of categorised supplies, may face 25 years in jail for his involvement within the leak.
The new messages from Airman Teixeira, greater than 9,500 in all, go away many questions unanswered about his motivations, however they fill in substantial gaps left by courtroom filings and supply essential clues about his mind-set. He appears to have seen himself, in a way, because the writer of an insider e-newsletter based to coach his on-line pals — not a whistle-blower plotting a grand exposé of presidency secrets and techniques.
“As of now Ukraine has ordered the US biolabs it still has to destroy all of the dangerous pathogens they hold,” he wrote in March final yr. “We got a comm interception from high ranking commanders stating that Russia was going to start trying to take them.”
The messages bristle with bravado and contradictions, none extra baffling than his concurrent admiration and suspicion of presidency, particularly for the “3 letter agencies,” such because the C.I.A. and F.B.I., which he believed had been engaged in myriad plots.
“Isis was an org started by turkey, israel and the US,” he wrote in July. “They needed to destabilize the middle east some how and all had enemies…how do you do that? make a terror org and fund the shit out of it.”
Still, Airman Teixeira appeared to take delight in working at a safe facility on a army base on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, that he referred to as “the box,” and he beloved utilizing jargon that signaled his high secret clearance. So frequent had been his leaks of intelligence gathered by authorities businesses that his Discord pals referred to as him “intel man” and “3 letter man,” and he appeared to revel of their approval.
And whereas he adopted the function of a impartial struggle analyst along with his Discord group — meticulously ferreting out casualty numbers and tank losses — he ceaselessly parroted pro-Russian reviews he discovered on the favored messaging app Telegram, and constantly minimized Moscow’s setbacks.
Airman Teixeira began posting messages on the server on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and group members had been intensely curious in regards to the intelligence he offered.
The server has about 600 members from at the very least 25 nations, in accordance with their on-line profiles, and remained energetic as not too long ago as final week.
Many of Airman Teixeira’s messages had been deleted from the server shortly earlier than his arrest in April, together with pictures of high secret intelligence paperwork. But his 1000’s of posts relationship again to 2021 that remained present a granular view of the airman in his personal phrases.
It is tough to pin down Airman Teixeira’s ideology from his messages. Many are according to somebody who is correct of middle, however he accuses Republicans of funding “terrorist organizations” and beginning “20 year long wars.”
“Both parties,” he wrote in July, “drink the same blood,” including that “both have called drone strikes on hospitals lol.” (The airman didn’t level to particular incidents in making his assertion.)
His politics appear to be dominated by his vehement opposition to firearms restrictions — criticizing former Presidents Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump for passing numerous gun management measures.
Federal prosecutors, in an 18-page memo calling for Airman Teixeira’s indefinite detention, cited his arsenal and “troubling” history of violent remarks and racial threats dating back to high school. The filing also included excerpts from social media chats from 2022 and 2023. In one, prosecutors say, Airman Teixeira expressed a desire to kill a “ton of people” and cull the “weak minded.” In another, he described an “assassination van” that could be used to cruise around killing people.
A representative for Airman Teixeira’s family declined to comment, and his court-appointed lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
The posts might be the hyperbolic utterances of a young man immersed in first-person shooter and war-themed video games, and the materials reviewed by The Times do not explicitly indicate that he was planning acts of violence.
But in chat logs analyzed by The Times, the airman posted multiple videos of himself firing various rifles. In one target practice session in February, he shot a Soviet-designed semiautomatic rifle from the bed of a truck. Days before, according to the prosecutors’ filing, he solicited advice about firing an AR-style rifle “out of an suv” in “a crowded urban or suburban environment.”
Posts reviewed by The Times indicate that Airman Teixeira claimed to have at least 16 firearms over two years. The airman posted about six new guns in February and March alone, suggesting he was acquiring weapons shortly before his arrest.
One Discord user who frequently communicated with Airman Teixeira told The Times in text messages that the airman claimed to have been stockpiling weapons and military gear. The user, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the airman had discussed various ambitions, including plotting to confront protesters during the 2024 presidential campaign, hog hunting in rural New England and modifying vehicles that could be outfitted with weapons.
The user was not certain if Airman Teixeira intended to carry out any of the plans.
His messages show a clear fascination with mass shootings, and at times, he adopted the same sense of detachment that he exhibited in posts about the war in Ukraine, focusing more on gear than on the human toll of their use.
“I think analyzing mass shootings is cool. And fun,” he wrote on Sept. 5, 2022, during an exchange about similarities among shooters in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo.
In October, when another user posted a video of a police officer being fatally shot during a traffic stop, Airman Teixeira responded, “one of my favorite shooting vids.” He was not interested in the circumstances of the shooting, saying he was trying to examine the firearms used in the encounter.
In a series of posts last summer, Airman Teixeira said the cost and sophistication of firearm kits used by gunmen in mass shootings suggested they had been supplied by the government. He also claimed he had received tips from co-workers in intelligence who had advance knowledge of mass shootings. On one Sunday in June, for example, he wrote: “theres going to be another shooting this wednesday. possible smaller one on monday.”
Several members of the chat group also echoed this conspiracy theory and put stock in Airman Teixeira’s predictions, none of which came true.
From his long trail of posts, Airman Teixeira seemed to relish showing his friends on Discord that he was privy to materials unavailable to the general public.
On Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, members of the group were ribbing the airman, saying he had shared old open-source material anyone might pull from Twitter. The next night, he gave his first glimpse of insider access.
“Saw a pentagon report saying that ⅓rd of the force is being used to invade,” he wrote.
It failed to impress. On Feb. 26, he was more overt. “I have a little more than open source info,” he noted in a message about Russian thermobaric rocket launchers. “Perks of being in a USAF intel unit.” By Feb. 27, his friends were showing him more respect — and he rewarded them by posting a report on Russia’s naval landing near Mariupol, saying that he had received the information from a work colleague whom he called his “intel homie.”
As the leaks earned him cachet in the group chat, he grew bolder, posting transcripts of portions of intelligence documents, even as he delighted in making predictions based on inside information about the conflict.
Airman Teixeira often used his phone to write his intelligence updates from the base. In one 550-word message in March last year, Airman Teixeira detailed war casualties, a Ukrainian strike on a Russian ammunition depot and Turkey’s decision not to send S-400 air defense systems to Ukraine, among other things.
“Whew that was a lot to type” on a phone, he wrote.
His posts indicate he was aware his leaks could lead to serious punishment. When one member asked in March last year, “can you post any document regarding the losses or are they sekrit,” the airman replied, “If I want to go to jail for the rest of my life yeah.”
One Discord user, who asked to be identified by his username, the Mighty Dink, said on Facebook Messenger that he had warned the airman of the repercussions of sharing sensitive information: “a few of us said be careful,” he wrote, “but you cant help those that don’t want to be helped.”
Another person, who goes by the username Zhyopnik and who is a college student in Minnesota majoring in Russian and Eastern European studies, said that he had worried where the leaked documents would end up, “especially when you’re posting in servers with international communities.”
Ultimately, however, Airman Teixeira seemed to assume that the members of an online chat group would do something he was unwilling to do: keep a secret.
In March, when the documents he leaked started to circulate beyond his Discord chat groups, Airman Teixeira announced he would no longer be posting his intelligence updates on Ukraine, citing not the dangers but the burdens of his second job.
“Basically I don’t want to cover the war anymore, it burned me out a lot,” he wrote on March 19, less than a month before his arrest.
He added a caveat.
He would still field information requests through direct messaging.
John Ismay, Haley Willis and Jay Senter contributed reporting.
Source: www.nytimes.com