The 21-year-old member of the U.S. Air National Guard who is facing criminal charges for leaking top-secret military intelligence records to a group of friends on a gamer web site remained in jail on Wednesday as his detention hearing was delayed for two weeks.
The suspect, Jack Teixeira, was arrested last week by heavily armed FBI agents at his mother’s residence in North Dighton, Massachusetts, and had been scheduled for the hearing in Boston on Wednesday.
The hearing was intended to determine whether he should be detained while awaiting trial on two charges of copying and taking the classified documents off the Cape Cod air base where he worked and then sending them to his friends on the Discord social media site — possibly to impress them about his access to the sensitive material and to educate them about Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Investigators say they believe that Teixeira passed on the documents to his friends believing they would not be further disseminated. But one of his friends posted the material to a wider audience, and the documents quickly spread worldwide on social media sites.
The classified material, according to U.S. news accounts, disclosed U.S. spying on friends and foes across the globe, American assessments of the strength of Russian and Ukrainian military forces, and a belief that the Chinese air force holds a distinct aerial advantage over the military defense of Taiwan, the democratic island territory that Beijing claims is part of mainland China.
Authorities with information about the investigation have said that the young cadre of friends linked to Teixeira liked to play war games online and were intensely interested in weaponry and military gear.
Federal prosecutors in the case told U.S. Magistrate Judge David Hennessy they intended to seek Teixeira’s continued detention. However, about two hours before the hearing, Teixeira’s team of federal public defenders filed a request asking the judge to delay the detention hearing for two weeks because they needed “more time to address the issues presented by the government’s request for detention.” Hennessy agreed to the delay.
It was not clear whether Teixeira will opt to challenge the government’s detention request, but in the U.S., high-profile defendants are often jailed pending trial.
On Wednesday morning, Teixeira was brought to the courtroom in handcuffs and orange jail garb as he waived his right to a preliminary hearing. He said nothing beyond answering yes and no to questions about whether he understood his rights and the proceeding.
Authorities say the leaked documents at the center of the case constitute the most serious U.S. security breach since more than 700,000 documents, videos and diplomatic cables appeared on the WikiLeaks website in 2010. The Pentagon has called the leak from the Massachusetts air base in the northeastern U.S. a “deliberate, criminal act.”
A criminal complaint made public on Friday charges Teixeira with one count of violating the Espionage Act related to the unlawful copying and transmitting of sensitive defense material, and a second charge related to the unlawful removal of defense material to an unauthorized location.
Legal experts say that Teixeira could face more charges as additional evidence is presented over time to a grand jury.
Some material in this report came from Reuters.
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