Pentagon leaker Jack Teixeira gets 15 years in prison for sharing classified docs on Discord

Pentagon leaker Jack Teixeira was sentenced to 15 years in prison Tuesday after admitting that he shared highly classified military documents about the war in Ukraine on Discord. The disgraced 22-year-old former Massachusetts Air National guardsman will also be subject to three years of supervised release when his prison term is up, Boston federal court Judge Indira Talwani ruled.The sentence follows Teixeira’s March guilty plea to six counts of willfully retaining and transmitting national defense information related to the unprecedented security breach.Federal prosecutors had sought a maximum prison sentence of 200 months, or more than 16 years behind bars, for Teixeira – arguing that the ex-cyber transport systems journeyman “perpetrated one of the most significant and consequential violations of the Espionage Act in American history.” “As both a member of the United States Armed Forces and a clearance holder, the defendant took an oath to defend the United States and to protect its secrets — secrets that are vital to US national security and the physical safety of Americans serving overseas,” prosecutors told the judge.“Teixeira violated his oath, almost every day, for over a year.”Lawyers for Teixeira – a native of North Dighton, Mass., who enlisted in the US Air National Guard in 2019 – argued for the minimum sentence of 11 years in prison, citing the leaker’s post-arrest autism diagnosis and his ADHD. “Jack is still essentially a child – at the very least, a ‘youthful offender’ – who has his whole life in front of him,” Teixeira’s attorneys wrote in a sentencing memo to Talwani.His legal team described Teixeira as an isolated individual who didn’t intend to “harm the United States” and only sought to “educate his friends about world events.” “To Jack, the Ukraine war was his generation’s World War II or Iraq, and he needed someone to share the experience with,” his attorneys wrote. Teixeira was arres...