WORCESTER, Massachusetts — A US Air National Guardsman accused of leaking army secrets and techniques and holding an arsenal of weapons in his bed room will seem in federal court docket on Thursday, the place federal prosecutors are anticipated to argue he ought to stay in custody as a result of he poses a nationwide safety danger.
Jack Douglas Teixeira was arrested by the FBI on April 13 at his house in Massachusetts and charged with violating the Espionage Act. He is scheduled to seem in US District Court in Worcester, Massachusetts, on Thursday afternoon for his detention listening to.
Prosecutors say the 21-year-old leaked categorised paperwork, together with some referring to troop actions within the Russia-Ukraine battle, to a bunch of players on the messaging app Discord.
In a submitting late on Wednesday, they stated he had destroyed proof within the case and so they additionally pointed to his historical past of creating violent threats on-line, saying he needs to be detained pending trial as a result of he’s a flight danger and poses a menace.
Teixeira, who lived together with his mom and stepfather, stored a gun locker two toes from his mattress, which contained handguns, bolt-action rifles and a military-style rifle with a high-capacity journal, based on the federal government’s submitting.
FBI brokers additionally discovered a fuel masks, ammunition and what seemed to be a “silencer-style accessory in his desk drawer,” the federal government stated.
They additionally stated they worry he “may still have access to a trove of classified information” and could possibly be a goal 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 docket submitting on Thursday stated they opposed pretrial detention, and requested the decide to let him go house to the custody of his father. They provided to have him put up a bond of $20,000 and put on a location monitoring system, and stated he could possibly be prohibited from utilizing the web with out parental supervision.
The authorities “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 additionally prompt that their consumer not has entry to top-secret data, neither is he accused of making an attempt 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 anticipated to dig into Teixeira’s historical past relationship again to his teenage years.
When he was in highschool, they stated Teixeira was suspended after he was overheard making racial threats and remarks about weapons. Teixeira attributed these remarks to a reference in a online game, based on prosecutors.
More lately, in November 2022, Teixeira stated if he had his method, he would “kill a ton of people” as a result of it could be “culling the weak-minded,” prosecutors alleged in paperwork supporting their movement to detain Teixeira.
His attorneys on Thursday sought to downplay the highschool incident, saying it was “thoroughly investigated” and that he was allowed to return to high school after a psychiatric analysis.
“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. — Reuters
Source: www.gmanetwork.com
