By Tim McLaughlin, Sarah N. Lynch
WORCESTER, Massachusetts (Reuters) -A U.S. Air National Guardsman accused of leaking military secrets and keeping an arsenal of weapons in his bedroom will appear in federal court on Thursday, where federal prosecutors are expected to argue he should remain in custody because he poses a national security risk.
Jack Douglas Teixeira was arrested by the FBI on April 13 at his home in Massachusetts and charged with violating the Espionage Act. He is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Worcester, Massachusetts, on Thursday afternoon for his detention hearing.
Prosecutors say the 21-year-old leaked classified documents, including some relating to troop movements in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, to a group of gamers on the messaging app Discord.
In a filing late on Wednesday, they said he had destroyed evidence in the case and they also pointed to his history of making violent threats online, saying he should be detained pending trial because he is a flight risk and poses a threat.
Teixeira, who lived with his mother and stepfather, kept a gun locker two feet from his bed, which contained handguns, bolt-action rifles and a military-style rifle with a high-capacity magazine, according to the government’s filing.
FBI agents also found a gas mask, ammunition and what appeared to be a “silencer-style accessory in his desk drawer,” the government said.
They also said they fear he “may still have access to a trove of classified information” and could be a target for “hostile nation states that could offer him safe harbor and attempt to facilitate his escape from the United States.”
Teixeira’s attorneys in a court filing on Thursday said they opposed pretrial detention, and asked the judge to let him go home to the custody of his father. They offered to have him post a bond of $20,000 and wear a location monitoring device, and said he could be prohibited from using the internet without parental supervision.
The government “engages in hyperbolic judgments and provides little more than speculation that a foreign adversary will seduce Mr. Teixeira and orchestrate his clandestine escape from the United States,” they wrote.
“This argument is illusory. The government has presented no articulable facts to support these assertions.”
They also suggested that their client no longer has access to top-secret information, nor is he accused of trying to disseminate it broadly.
“There is no allegation … that Mr. Teixeira had any intent for these documents to become widely available on the internet or desired to disrupt the geopolitical affairs of the United States,” they wrote.
To make their case, prosecutors are expected to dig into Teixeira’s history dating back to his teenage years.
When he was in high school, they said Teixeira was suspended after he was overheard making racial threats and remarks about guns. Teixeira attributed those remarks to a reference in a video game, according to prosecutors.
More recently, in November 2022, Teixeira said if he had his way, he would “kill a [expletive] ton of people” because it would be “culling the weak minded,” prosecutors alleged in documents supporting their motion to detain Teixeira.
His attorneys on Thursday sought to downplay the high school incident, saying it was “thoroughly investigated” and that he was allowed to return to school after a psychiatric evaluation.
“The investigation was fully known and vetted by the Air National Guard prior to enlisting and also when he obtained his top-secret security clearance,” they added.
(Reporting By Tim McLaughlin in Worcester and Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Jonathan Oatis)
