The Air National Guardsman accused of posting a trove of classified documents to social media is expected back in court Thursday for a hearing on whether he will be kept in jail during the course of his legal case.
The detention hearing, which was originally scheduled for last week but was postponed at the last minute, is slated to take place in Massachusetts.
Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, is accused of posting classified intelligence – including sensitive information on the war in Ukraine – on social media platform Discord in a series of leaks that revealed the scope of US intelligence gathering on both its allies and adversaries.
Teixeira has not yet entered a formal plea.
On Thursday, a judge will decide whether Teixeira should continue to be detained as he faces charges under the Espionage Act.
Federal prosecutors previewed arguments that Teixeira should stay behind bars while he awaits trial in a court filing late Wednesday, saying that he posed a flight risk and that the government was still grappling with the amount of stolen classified information.
Teixeira, prosecutors alleged, viewed hundreds of classified documents – which the government said he may still have access to – and conducted hundreds more keyword searches “in what appears to be a deliberate effort to disseminate this country’s secrets.”
“The Defendant knows where the information is,” prosecutors wrote. “He knows how to access it. And based on his specialized IT skills, he presumably knows how to disseminate that information without being immediately noticed.”
“Put simply, there is nothing a court can do to ensure the Defendant’s compliance with his conditions of release other than take the Defendant at his word. And the Defendant’s history of honoring similar types of…
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