U.S. senators said Wednesday the leak of top-secret military intelligence records by a 21-year-old member of the U.S. Air National Guard should prompt a serious re-evaluation of security procedures in the United States.
The suspect, Jack Teixeira, was arrested last week by heavily armed FBI agents at his mother's residence in Dighton, Massachusetts. He is facing criminal charges for leaking those documents to a group of friends on a gamer website and remained in jail on Wednesday. His scheduled detention hearing was delayed for two weeks.
"There are too many people with too much access to too much information without guardrails and safeguards," Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal told reporters after a classified briefing on the leak Wednesday.
"If you're going to give someone with this level of emotional maturity access to the information, why weren't we using technology to stop him from sharing?" Republican Senator John Kennedy said, telling reporters the briefing raised more questions than answers.
Teixeira had been scheduled for a court hearing in Boston on Wednesday. The hearing was intended to determine whether he should be detained while awaiting trial on two charges of copying and taking the classified documents off the Cape Cod air base where he worked and then sending them to his friends on the Discord social media site — possibly to impress them about his access to the sensitive material and to educate them about Russia's war in Ukraine.
Investigators say they believe that Teixeira passed the documents to his friends believing they would not be further disseminated. But one of his friends posted the material to a wider audience, and the documents quickly spread worldwide on social media sites.
Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters Wednesday, "We need to make sure that internal security processes from things like copying documents, production of documents, as well as the overall access questions get thoroughly examined."
"One of the things that we have moved into in this internet-driven age is a process called continuous vetting," he said. "So even once you get a security clearance, a top-secret security clearance, you're supposed to be vetted on an ongoing basis."
The classified material, according to U.S. news accounts, disclosed U.S. spying on friends and foes around the globe: American assessments of the strength of Russian and Ukrainian military forces, and a belief that the Chinese air force holds a distinct aerial advantage over the military defense of Taiwan, the democratic island territory that Beijing claims is part of mainland China.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters Wednesday the leaks had a serious impact on U.S. national security.
"Trouble that has created domestic political problems for key allies, undermined our relationship with those allies and potentially cost us access to future key intelligence. I think it's stunning that the Department of Defense and the intelligence agencies found out about it primarily from the press — it's unacceptable," Rubio said.
Friends liked playing war games online
Authorities with information about the investigation have said that the young cadre of friends linked to Teixeira liked to play war games online and were intensely interested in weaponry and military gear.
Federal prosecutors in the case told U.S. Magistrate Judge David Hennessy they intended to seek Teixeira's continued detention. However, about two hours before the hearing, Teixeira's team of federal public defenders filed a request asking the judge to delay the detention hearing for two weeks because they needed "more time to address the issues presented by the government's request for detention." Hennessy agreed to the delay.
It was not clear whether Teixeira will opt to challenge the government's detention request.
Pentagon calls leak 'criminal'
On Wednesday morning, Teixeira was brought to the courtroom in handcuffs and orange jail clothing as he waived his right to a preliminary hearing. He said nothing beyond answering yes and no to questions about whether he understood his rights and the proceeding.
Authorities say the leaked documents at the center of the case constitute the most serious U.S. security breach since more than 700,000 documents, videos and diplomatic cables appeared on the WikiLeaks website in 2010. The Pentagon has called the leak from the Massachusetts air base in the northeastern U.S. a "deliberate, criminal act."
A criminal complaint made public on Friday charges Teixeira with one count of violating the Espionage Act related to the unlawful copying and transmitting of sensitive defense material, and a second charge related to the unlawful removal of defense material to an unauthorized location.
Legal experts say that Teixeira could face more charges as additional evidence is presented over time to a grand jury.
Some material in this report came from Reuters.
Editor's note: The article was updated to remove a sentence characterizing what defendants typically detained or released on bail pending trial.
