The mystery and drama of the story of Jack Teixeira deepened this week as the U.S. Air Force suspended two National Guard commanders from the unit Teixeira belonged to.
The move comes not too long after the unit lost its intel mission, which RedState Managing Editor Jennifer Van Laar reported last week.
Teixeira is accused of improperly accessing and then leaking classified U.S. intelligence over Discord servers, which are used primarily for gaming. While it’s not believed that the intelligence was broadly distributed, it still represented a major breach of classified intelligence, with the U.S. military heavily concerned about access and leaks.
Via Reuters:
The Air Force spokesman said on Wednesday that it had suspended the operation commander and detachment commander of the 102nd Intelligence Wing, where Teixeira served. The Air Force did not identify the commanders by name.
“This means that both the squadron’s state Air National Guard operational commander and current federal orders administrative commander have been suspended pending completion of the Department of the Air Force Inspector General Investigation,” the spokesman said.
“Also, the Department of Air Force has temporarily removed these individuals’ access to classified systems and information,” he said.
The leak is the most serious breach of U.S. classified information in 13 years. In 2010, a document stash containing 700,000 documents was obtained by the website WikiLeaks.
According to Reuters, Teixeira may well be looking at more charges. New evidence is being presented to a grand jury, various legal experts say, and a conviction on the Espionage Act charge carries up to 10 years in federal prison.
But making the case even more bizarre is former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Kash Patel confirming reports that there appears to be no reason Teixeira could have been able to access the level of intelligence he’d obtained.
“You can be the biggest IT person in DOD,” Patel said, “and you are still compartmented off of the actual information. Almost never does an IT person need to know, as we say, the substance of the intelligence. Their job is to provide the secure informations systems around it to protect any disclosures.”
That’s on top of Defense Department officials on background telling outlets like ABC News that the “need to know” information was not anything Teixeira needed to know in his role with the Air Force National Guard.
The story continues to unfold but leaves analysts and officials seemingly with more questions than answers.
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