NORTH DIGHTON, Mass. (TIP): Federal investigators on Thursday, April 13, arrested a 21-year-old air national guardsman who they believe is linked to a trove of leaked classified U.S. intelligence documents, which have upended relations with American allies and exposed weaknesses in the Ukrainian military, according to a news report in New York Times.
The man, who The New York Times first identified as Jack Teixeira, is a member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard and is tied to an online group where the leaked documents first appeared.
Airman Teixeira oversaw an online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.
On Thursday afternoon, around a half-dozen rifle-carrying F.B.I. agents pushed onto the property of Airman Teixeira. The F.B.I. said in a statement Thursday that it had made an arrest and is continuing to conduct “authorized law enforcement activity” at a residence in North Dighton. Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters that he could not confirm that Airman Teixeira is a person of interest. Earlier in the day, President Biden told reporters that the United States was “getting close” to finding answers about the leak.
Two U.S. officials confirmed that investigators want to talk to Airman Teixeira about the leak of the government documents to the private online group. One official said he might have information relevant to the investigation.Starting months ago, the authorities say, one of the users of the online group uploaded hundreds of pages of intelligence briefings into the small chat group, lecturing its members, who had bonded during the isolation of the pandemic, on the importance of staying abreast of world events.
The New York Times spoke with four members of the Thug Shaker Central chat group, where Airman Teixeira served as group administrator. While the gaming friends would not identify the group’s leader by name, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The Times leads to Airman Teixeira.
Here’s what else to know:
The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of the Thug Shaker Central group through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira’s childhood home — posted on social media in family photographs — also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents. Members of Thug Shaker Central who spoke to The Times said that the documents they discussed online were meant to be purely informative, and started to get wider attention only after one of the teenage members took a few dozen of them and posted them to a public online forum. The person who leaked, they said, was no whistle-blower, and the secret documents were never meant to leave their small corner of the internet. The leaked documents reveal sensitive material — maps of Ukrainian air defenses and a review of South Korea’s secret plans to deliver ammunition to Ukraine — but it is the immediate relevance of the intelligence that most worries White House and Pentagon officials: Some of the documents appear to be barely 40 days old.