Former military man Jack Teixeira was sentenced this Tuesday to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty for a leak of classified Pentagon documents on the social network Discord.
Teixeira, 22, appeared in federal court in Boston, Massachusetts to be sentenced.
The former military man’s defense requested a sentence of 11 years, the minimum provided for in the plea agreement, while prosecutors demanded a maximum of almost 17 years.
Federal Judge Indira Talwani finally made the decision to sentence him to 15 years.
Addressing the court, Teixeira said he “regrets the harm caused.”
“I understand all my responsibility and that the consequences fall on my shoulders. “I accept whatever that entails,” he said.
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Federal prosecutor Jared Dolan compared Teixeira’s case to those of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and said his conviction will be “a sobering example” for those with access to classified information.
“The sentence imposed must send a clear message to these people: that they should not even think about doing what he did,” he said.
Teixeira, who served in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, pleaded guilty in March, modifying his initial plea of not guilty.
The former military man admitted crimes of “intentional retention and transmission of national defense information” under the United States Espionage Act.
Thanks to the pact, Teixeira avoided a sentence that, if he had been found guilty by the court, could have reached 60 years in prison.
Teixeira leaked secret Pentagon documents on Discord, a social network used, above all, by video game fans, after having obtained that information while serving at an Air National Guard base in Massachusetts.
The Department of Defense discovered that there were classified documents of his circulating on the internet in March 2023. The young man was arrested by the FBI a month later.
Teixeira presented information about the military equipment that the United States was going to send to Ukraine and how it was going to be sent and used.
Likewise, in one of the documents he shared online there was data about a plan by a foreign enemy to attack US forces deployed outside the country.
With information from EFE
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