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As he tapped anxiously at his computer keyboard one afternoon in early spring, Charles wondered when the FBI would arrest his best friend.

He had last spoken to Jack Teixeira online two days earlier. Teixeira had said to “keep low and delete any information that could even possibly relate to him.” The next day, he “went ghost mode … just went off the internet,” Charles said.

Teixeira was not on the run, but he was frantic. Over the past year, he had shared an enormous amount of highly classified government intelligence with about two dozen friends in a virtual clubhouse that they had set up on Discord, a digital platform especially popular with video gamers. It let Teixeira and his friends — who, like Charles, were mostly teenage boys — talk and play together online.

For more than two years, they had hung out nearly every day, and in the throes of covid lockdowns, usually all day.

Teixeira was just 21, but he was enlisted in the Massachusetts Air National Guard and worked as a computer technician inside an intelligence facility at a military base on Cape Cod. The job came with a top-secret security clearance that gave Teixeira access to computer networks containing some of the most highly classified information in the U.S. government. The boys looked up to him like an older brother or world-wise uncle.

Charles said the tightknit group of friends, who shared a love of guns and military hardware, understood not to share outside their circle the classified information that Teixeira brought home from work. But just over a month earlier, in late February, and unbeknownst to the group, one of their members started to post around 50 documents to another space on Discord, known as a server. Someone on that server shared them, too, and soon the documents were spreading across the platform, available to thousands of users.

It took the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies weeks to notice. By early April, the documents had popped up around the wider internet, including on social media channels frequented by pro-Russian propagandists. Federal law enforcement agents were hunting for the leaker and racing to mop up a flood of secrets.

Charles and his online friends knew the authorities were looking for Teixeira. He “seemed very confused and lost as to what to do,” said Charles, who is a minor and agreed to recount his experience on the condition that only his middle name be used and with the permission of one of his parents.

Charles estimated that Teixeira had posted about 350 documents, which he removed from work and photographed at home with his phone, along with many hundreds more that he had typed by hand into the server’s chat box. The documents revealed secrets obtained by nearly every element of the U.S. intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, law enforcement agencies and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), arguably the most secretive spy agency in the government, responsible for a multibillion-dollar constellation of satellites.

Other intelligence leaks in recent years had offered deep insights into particular operations of the military or the intelligence community, or exposed the inner workings of a single department. The huge cache of information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that Chelsea Manning gave to WikiLeaks in 2010 offered a fly-on-the wall view of military operations and diplomatic maneuverings. The NSA briefing documents revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 uncovered the nitty-gritty of electronic surveillance.

The disclosures allegedly from Teixeira were remarkable for their breadth and timeliness. The documents, hundreds of which The Washington Post obtained, touched on seemingly every hot-button issue and global trouble spot that America’s spies were watching. And they were of recent vintage, spanning a period from around February to March, offering deep insights on events that were developing by the day. They reflected Teixeira’s omnivorous appetite for information about global affairs. It was as if he had gone to the secrets buffet and sampled one of every dish.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/13/suspect-pentagon-documents-leak/" target=_blank>Teixeira was arrested on April 13</a>. He has pleaded not guilty to six counts of illegal retention and transmission of national defense information, crimes that could send him to prison for years if he is convicted.

Wcvb-Tv

In the eight months since his arrest, federal law enforcement investigators and top intelligence officials, as well as Teixeira’s online friends, have struggled to understand what may have driven him to carry out one of the biggest classified intelligence disclosures in years. Nothing about Teixeira fit the profile of the traditional leaker. He wasn’t trying to expose official misdeeds. He wasn’t a principled whistleblower. Why would he give classified documents to a bunch of teenagers?

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/12/11/discord-leaks-documentary/" target=_blank>Documents and interviews by The Post in partnership with “Frontline”</a> with more than four dozen people, including those who knew Teixeira online and in real life, as well as national security officials and experts, offer the most detailed account yet of his motivations, how he allegedly obtained so many national security secrets and how he was caught.

Washington Post - Frontline

New reporting by The Washington Post and “<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/" target=_blank>Frontline</a>” reveals details about Jack Teixeira’s alleged leak of classified U.S. intelligence on the Discord chat platform, his possible motivations and the red flags officials missed.

Based on a collaborative months-long investigation, “The Discord Leaks” examines one of the biggest leaks of government secrets in U.S. history. The documentary is available to watch on <a href="http://pbs.org/frontline" target=_blank>pbs.org/frontline</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/12/11/discord-leaks-documentary" target=_blank>washingtonpost.com</a>.

The answers are alarming and at times bewildering. They expose how vulnerable the Pentagon is to a threat from within and the vast proliferation of top-secret information across the government. Teixeira used his privileged access to read intelligence documents and reports that had nothing to do with his assigned duties. His superiors caught him in the act several times but did not remove him from his job.

Teixeira was intensely interested in the war in Ukraine and other high-stakes matters of global security. He posted classified information in part to educate his friends, but also apparently to show off and demonstrate that he knew things most people did not.

His online world was a hothouse of racist and violent rhetoric, suffused with conspiracy theories. He sought out classified information to validate his baseless suspicions that federal law enforcement was complicit in mass violence as part of a plot to subdue and control the citizenry.

For Teixeira, information was power, and classified information appeared irresistible.

Teixeira’s mother, father and stepfather declined requests to speak with The Post and “<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/" target=_blank>Frontline</a>.” Teixeira and his lawyers declined to be interviewed. Several U.S. officials declined interview requests, citing the pending criminal case. The Defense Department would not discuss the decision to grant Teixeira a security clearance.

Intelligence officials said the trove Teixeira is accused of revealing was extraordinarily damaging, full of details about the course of the Russia-Ukraine war, including troop casualty numbers that neither Moscow nor Kyiv had publicly shared. They discussed Ukrainian planning for sabotage operations and demonstrated that the United States was monitoring the communications of the Russian military, as well as Ukrainian generals and political leaders. And they revealed the remarkably bleak outlook for a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/04/ukraine-counteroffensive-us-planning-russia-war/" target="_blank">coming Ukrainian counteroffensive</a>, at a time when American and European officials were publicly bullish about it.

Heidi Levine

Teixeira posted <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/14/chinese-spy-balloon-leaked-documents/" target=_blank>photographs taken by a U.S. surveillance plane of the Chinese spy balloon</a> that drifted across North America two months before he was arrested. Other documents detailed North Korean drones, tense U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan’s vulnerability to an invasion by China.

U.S. officials had another reason to panic when they saw what Teixeira had stolen. Every piece of intelligence offered some hints as to how the spy agencies had obtained it, threatening valuable sources of the information and endangering the people who passed secrets to U.S. spies. One document identified a little-known advanced satellite system for capturing images of objects on the ground. Outing the system could make it more susceptible to Russian jamming or interference, U.S. officials said. Another document identified a person who gave details to the Dutch military intelligence agency about <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/11/nordstream-bombing-ukraine-chervinsky/" target="_blank">Ukraine’s plan to blow up the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines</a>. That information, once exposed, risked the life of the source, Dutch officials feared.

Charles was convinced that if Teixeira didn’t leave the country, the FBI would essentially disappear his friend: “He’ll be sent to Guantánamo.”

Boston Globe

Teixeira had warned the boys that federal authorities were “nefarious,” Charles said, capable of fiendish abuses. He claimed without evidence that “the feds” knew in advance of the racist May 2022 mass killing in Buffalo, among other massacres, and let them happen to create a pretext for tightening gun-control laws, Charles said. The boys received Teixeira’s baseless and conspiratorial pronouncements as insider confirmation of the dim views they already harbored.

“Everyone in the server was not a fan of federal agents and thought they did no good,” Charles said. He was determined to keep his friend safe and free as long as possible.

Teixeira’s real-life friends, the ones who had known him since childhood in Dighton, Mass., weren’t surprised he joined the military. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/13/jack-teixeira-discord-document-leak/" target=_blank>He had aspired to uniformed service</a>. And from a young age, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/05/13/jack-teixeira-discord-leaked-documents/" target=_blank>he had been fascinated with military history and weaponry</a>.

As a middle-schooler, Teixeira read books on World War II aircraft, sometimes carrying one around like a child might cling to a favorite toy. Preston LaBree, who met Teixeira in middle school, remembers him immersed in the world of fighter planes. “He was kind of goofy. … But he was very mature in the sense that he had real passions,” LaBree said.

Another passion was video games. Gaming became a social nucleus for Teixeira and his friends. “We’re all little kids. We don’t have cars. We all loved video games, probably at times more than life itself,” LaBree said. They played violent shooter games like “Grand Theft Auto V” or “Call of Duty.”

Voice chat technology let Teixeira and his friends play together from their separate homes. “It was just so easy to catch each other on PlayStation,” LaBree said. “It was just an everyday thing.” The digital playroom became a space where the kids could be themselves.

“You make jokes with each other that you wouldn’t make with your mom or your dad or students who aren’t a part of a group,” LaBree said. “[Teixeira] was good at being funny.” LaBree said the kids developed a kind of shorthand, what he called “greenroom talk,” after the kinds of inside and off-color jokes he imagined stand-up comics tell each other backstage.

As Teixeira got older, video games let him show off his weapons expertise. But his fondness for military trivia became pedantic. When other players called the weapons, vehicles and gear by the wrong names, he corrected them. “He’s like, ‘Well, actually …’” LaBree said. “I’m like, ‘Bro, I’m just trying to steal this car.’”

Teixeira’s fascination with warfare translated to the classroom, where, despite generally middling grades, he received A’s in U.S. history, world cultures and civilizations, and a class his junior year on “contemporary world affairs,” according to his transcript from Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High School. He took vocational classes in automotive technology and metal work. His lowest grade senior year was a C-plus in computer science, which would become his field of work in the military.

His online friends said that Teixeira bristled at the structure of an academic environment. “I don’t think he liked the way school treated him … the way it was set up,” said a young woman who dated Teixeira and agreed to discuss their relationship using only her online handle, “Crow.”

Teixeira and Crow, who lived in different states and met online, spent hours together on Discord, including in private video chats apart from the younger kids. For a time, she was part of the same server on which Teixeira shared classified government documents, but she had left the group before he did so. He was smart and a good conversationalist, but also temperamental, she said.

Teixeira had graduated from high school, but he still appeared to hold grudges. “There were many late-night calls where he would rant to me about school,” Crow said. “How much he hated his [English] teacher and how much he hated some people, and he hated the principal, and how he wishes he could have shot up the school, how he should have done it.”

In March 2018, his sophomore year, a group of students reported Teixeira to the administration after they heard him “talking about Molotov cocktails and guns,” according to a copy of a Dighton police report that The Post and “Frontline” obtained following an official records request. Teixeira allegedly told one student, “I’ve got a moly [molotov cocktail] in my bag!” and asked, “What would you do if I threw one down the hall?” Another student said Teixeira made a similar statement to him about throwing the explosive at school.

Two teachers who had been trained on how to respond to a school shooter, and to spot warning signs of violence in their students, also expressed concerns about Teixeira “because of how much he talks about guns,” according to the police report.

A month earlier, Teixeira had shown classmates at a lunch table a video of someone apparently killed in battle in the Middle East. “Look at this!” Teixeira said “with a smile, almost as if he was excited,” the police report said.

Dighton police also took statements from several students who said Teixeira had made violent threats against Black people. They told investigators that Teixeira said, “I want to kill all Black people,” “Black people don’t exist,” and “I hate n-----s,” according to the police report. One student said Teixeira used the phrase “I want to kill all Black people” in his automotive class “a lot.”

One female student who reported Teixeira to administrators told police that he “makes racist comments and is always talking about guns or war and that she had also heard about him killing animals,” according to the report. The student also noted that Teixeira was attempting to obtain a firearms identification card “and that someone should know about it.” In the state of Massachusetts, the card permits the possession of “non-large-capacity rifles, shotguns, and ammunition.”

A Dighton police officer interviewed Teixeira, in the presence of his mother and stepfather. Teixeira confirmed he had made the statements about molotov cocktails and guns, but he claimed that they were taken out of context. He was talking with the two students about the video game “Call of Duty” and how to obtain the weapons within the game, Teixeira said, according to the police report. The students contradicted that account and told police they had discussed the game with Teixeira, but that he made his alarming remarks during a separate conversation.

Ultimately, Teixeira was suspended from school for one day and required to take a psychological risk assessment before returning to class. His stepfather, Thomas Dufault, an Air Force master sergeant, told the police officer he was concerned the incident might hurt Teixeira’s chance of joining the military.

It did not. Teixeira enlisted in the Massachusetts Air National Guard in 2019 and obtained his security clearance two years later.

Obtained by Washington Post

As part of his clearance application, the Defense Department conducted a standardized background investigation, which required that Teixeira fill out a lengthy personal questionnaire. Investigators would be expected to interview his friends and associates. The process is intended to find any information that might suggest the applicant isn’t fit for a position of trust handling classified information. Excessive debts, ties to foreign governments and violent or criminal behavior are all potentially “derogatory” factors that the Defense Department may use when deciding whether to grant or deny a security clearance.

By Teixeira’s own account, his suspension from school came up in his background check.

“Everything was explained to the investigator about the incident as well as police reports, school letters and any or all documents that were submitted to the investigator that were generated from this event,” Teixeira wrote in November 2020 to a Dighton police officer, when he was trying for a third time to obtain his firearms identification card. (His previous applications were denied because of the disturbing reports from his classmates.)

Teixeira, by then assigned to be a computer technician at the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base, pointed to his successful clearance application and his military service in support of his request for a firearms ID card. This time, it was granted.

Experts said that Teixeira’s violent, racist remarks at his high school were the kind of derogatory information that should have been weighed in his application for a security clearance.

“Security clearances are all about a predictive analysis of the risk to the United States,” said Mark Zaid, an attorney specializing in national security law. “You have to be able to protect national defense information. People’s lives may be at stake depending on what the information is that you have access to. Obviously someone who has a proclivity towards violence, that raises red flags.”

Experts said that background investigators and security officials sometimes view troubling incidents that occurred when the applicant was a minor as youthful indiscretions that aren’t disqualifying. But it’s unclear how the Pentagon’s decision-makers weighed the police report, or even if they were aware of it, as Teixeira claimed.

After this story was published, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/12/11/air-force-investigation-discord-leaks/" target=_blank>Defense Department released a report by the Air Force inspector general</a>, which determined that “some negative information was discovered” in the course of Teixeira’s background check. The report didn’t provide specifics but noted that “there were indications that [Airman 1st Class] Teixeira could have been subject to enhanced monitoring” at work as a result of what the background check had turned up.

But that negative information wasn’t shared with Teixeira’s unit, the inspector general found. “[H]ad the unit been made aware of potential security concerns identified during the clearance adjudication process, they may have acted more quickly after identifying additional insider threat indicators," the report concluded.

The Defense Department denied repeated requests from The Post and “Frontline” for additional information about Teixeira’s background investigation and the decision to grant his clearance and did not respond to questions about the police report. The department would not grant an interview with an official from the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, which adjudicates clearance decisions. The Post has sued under the federal Freedom of Information Act for records about Teixeira’s case.

In the 2020 letter to the Dighton police officer, Teixeira sounded contrite.

“I said some things … that were inappropriate, and unfortunately I was insensitive to the current events going on at other schools,” Teixeira wrote. He did not mention guns or molotov cocktails, and he did not apologize directly for his alleged racist remarks. “I lacked some of the social disciplines and the situational awareness needed at that time to make a logical decision on how to express myself verbally. … I never looked at how people reacted to what I said, and I didn’t think it would matter or affect my life. I understand now that I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

Teixeira said he had learned his lesson. But at the time he wrote that apology, he was emerging as the leader of his tiny Discord club. And in their online hangout, violent threats and racist jokes were typical conversation.

Allison Dinner

In March 2020, local governments across the United States began issuing the first restrictions related to covid-19. Schools closed and students moved their studies online. For Teixeira and his friends, their worlds collapsed to the size of a computer screen.

“Every day, you’d wake up, I’d do whatever, maybe schoolwork and then get on the voice channel or text, and we’d all just sit there for hours and talk and play games,” said one young gamer who met Teixeira during the pandemic lockdowns on a Discord server for fans of Oxide, a popular YouTuber who streamed videos about guns, body armor and military hardware. The gamer, who was 16 at the time, agreed to an interview on the condition that he be identified by his online handle, “Pucki.”

“A lot of us lived in parts [of the country] in which you could not go outside and go meet new people. And so for someone like me, who had just became a teenager, and I didn’t know anyone because I just moved to a new town, this was the perfect opportunity for me to bond with my new friends that I just met online,” said Charles, who also met Teixeira on the Oxide fan server during the lockdowns.

The server attracted large crowds and could “feel more like a town square where you can’t quite reach everyone, but you can catch one or two people in the street and have a good discussion with them,” said Charles, who first got on Discord when he was 13. Craving more intimacy, a few of the members decided to peel off and create a new server. Pucki served as the administrator, essentially controlling who was admitted by invitation only.

Accounts differ on why the young gamers decided to form a new hangout. Some said they wanted to have narrower discussions about military hardware. Others said the members were kicked out for making racist and antisemitic jokes, after they’d been warned to stop.

Teixeira, who had completed his Air Force basic training the previous August, also joined the new server. Pucki was nominally in charge, but the younger boys increasingly saw Teixeira as their leader.

“Anytime he entered the room, mood changed. Stuff’s going down, this is going to be fun. We’re going to have a good night,” Charles said. “He was funny. He was charismatic. And then he was also really good at games.”

Teixeira brought a level of credibility to the discussions of guns and gear that no other member of the server possessed.

Frontline (PBS)/The Washington Post

“People on that server looked up to him,” said Crow, who also was a member. “They wanted to be like him. … If he bought a game, everyone else bought a game.” In their private conversations, Crow, who lived in Texas, said Teixeira could drop the leader pose and become vulnerable. “One-on-one with him, he was much more of a genuinely sweet person.” But Crow also said her boyfriend could be “thin-skinned.”

“There were quite a few times he’d go on rants about certain guns or certain things because someone had doubted his knowledge on something, and so he wanted to prove that he knew it,” Crow said.

The two — who never met in real life — broke up in early 2022.

As the pandemic wore on, the group grew closer. Many lost touch with real-life friends. Eventually, in the fall of 2021, Teixeira took over as the owner of the server, and the character of the clubhouse began to change, starting with the name.

Members of the server occasionally changed its name, sometimes in a nod to an inside joke. Around mid-2022, they chose a new name that many still struggle to explain as anything but a racist, homophobic slur: Thug Shaker Central.

“Thug shaker,” originally a line from a gay porn film, refers to a category of online memes, in which Black men shake their bare buttocks. The clips are frequently used as a bait-and-switch, tacked on to innocuous videos or other memes.

“It was an inside joke to change the server name,” Pucki said. “We thought it was hysterical, so Thug Shaker Central. Screw it!”

The choice of server name reflected the members’ bigoted banter. Members frequently used the n-word. Teixeira referred to mainstream press as “zogshit,” appropriating a popular white-supremacist slur for the “Zionist Occupied Government.” The kids made jokes about 9/11 and the Holocaust. They made light of the 2019 mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that left 51 people dead.

The server became the center of some members’ online lives. “It was constant contact,” Pucki said. “It was like you were living with these people, almost. You could always message someone, ping them, mention them, say, ‘Hey dude, get on.’ … The topic was racist, edgy. Gore was posted. You’d post videos of jihadi beheadings and things like that or cartel killings. You’d be like, ‘Dude, look at this guy getting his head chopped off.’ It was cool.”

They traded ideas about the most effective or elaborate ways to kill federal agents, particularly from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a bête noire of the far right.

Teixeira seems to have grasped that the outside world might not share his sense of humor. While waiting on approval of his security clearance, Crow said he told her that he was particularly concerned that jokes he had made about “shooting up buildings” and “wanting to kill government agents” might surface. She said Teixeira changed his online handle to an innocuous version of his surname and became “less active” in the community for a time, in an effort not to create more incriminating evidence.

Defense Department background investigators don’t routinely scrutinize applicants’ social media history, experts said. It’s not clear that Teixeira disclosed his Discord handles or the names of servers he belonged to, but he wouldn’t have been required to do so. The apparent failure to investigate Teixeira’s online activity, and to interview his online friends, meant the Defense Department was effectively blind to a huge part of his life.

The summer of 2020 saw protests across the country following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a White police officer in Minneapolis. In instances where protests turned violent, Teixeira and his friends saw a dark harbinger. In video chats, “people would be in their military gear screaming about it,” Crow said. “There was one day where people joined the call and just started doing push-ups to prepare for the end times. … To them, it was like the police are just letting the Black people do whatever they want.”

“We would talk about how much we hated a race, whether that be Jews or Blacks,” Pucki said. “And whether it was serious or not, we didn’t care. It was funny and during such a time where we were so far removed from society. Because of covid, it was so easy to fall into that hole of just hating everything and sort of like a punk.”

The group found camaraderie in subversion. “We took joy in being offensive no matter who it was against,” Pucki said. “It was something that made us tighter as friends, like us against the world.”

Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, The Washington Post, 2021

George Polk Award, The Washington Post, 2021 

Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, The Washington Post, 2019  

Helen Bernstein Book Award For Excellence In Journalism, 2011

Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, 2010

The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State 

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex 

Wake Forest University, B.A. in Politics

Shane Harris writes about intelligence and national security. He was a member of reporting teams that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, as well as two George Polk Awards. He is also the winner of the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. Shane is the author of two books, "The Watchers" and "@War." 

Shane Harris

 United Nations Foundation Prize for humanitarian coverage, 2016

Binghamton University, BA in Geography

Samuel Oakford is a video reporter for The Washington Post's Visual Forensics team. Before joining The Post, he worked as a senior journalist at Storyful and a reporter for Vice News at the United Nations. He was also a reporter for the civilian harm monitor Airwars and conducted open source investigations for Bellingcat's Yemen Project. 

Samuel Oakford

washpost

Jack Teixeira got security clearance despite history of violent threats

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Photo illustration of a circular target shape with several layers featuring assorted close crops of Jack Teixeira's face.

Illustration by Lucy Naland/The Washington Post; Obtained by Washington Post; iStock

The Washington Post

An illustration of an eye with the headline: Jack Teixeira got security clearance despite history of violent threats

Illustration by Lucy Naland/The Washington Post; Obtained by The Washington Post; iStock

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