The FBI arrested a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman Thursday in its investigation of the recent leak of classified American intelligence documents touching on the war in Ukraine and other matters. Attorney General Merrick Garland identified the suspect as Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.
At this writing, the government has not formally charged Teixeira. A judge was ordering him held in detention until a detention hearing next week, the Associated Press reported.
The debate may remind readers of an incident close to Dayton. In 2021, a former contractor with the Air Force Research Laboratory and National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) was sentenced in federal court to one year and a day in prison for illegally taking some 2,500 pages of classified documents from NASIC at Wright-Patterson.
About two years earlier, federal investigators found that Izaak Vincent Kemp, 36 — despite training on how to safeguard classified material — took 112 classified documents and kept them at his Fairborn home.
On Friday, Zaid said he sees the sheer amount of classified information and the number of clearances as a continuing issue.
“They did not correct this problem in the last four years,” Zaid said.
Brendan Green, associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati, said he sees two immediate problems: First, the security breach itself. And second, the military had evidently given someone access to sensitive information who “probably should not have been anywhere near classified information.”
Sensitive information is “classified at ridiculous orders of magnitude inside the U.S. government. There is a massive over-classification problem within the U.S. government,” he said.
“That means lot of people who work for the government have to have clearances just to do their jobs,” Green said. “It sounds like this guy’s job was basically doing the IT on all the classified computers.”
He added: “When you classify everything, that means lots of people have to have access.”
U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Dayton, chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, welcomed news of the arrest.
“Leaking classified information jeopardizes our national security, negatively impacts our relationship with our allies, and places the safety of U.S. military and intelligence personnel at grave risk,” Turner said in a statement. “While we seek to learn the extent of classified information released and how to mitigate the fallout, the House Intelligence Committee will examine why this happened, why it went unnoticed for weeks, and how to prevent future leaks.
“It would not appear he should have had access to any of this information,” Turner said Friday, referring to Teixeira.
He pledged to hold hearings examining the problem. “There is bipartisan and bicameral concern about this issue.”
This is an issue ripe for rethinking at the federal level, Zaid believes. The SF-86 federal clearance form doesn’t even ask clearance applicants for online and web site user names, he said.
This recent batch of classified documents apparently first slipped into public view on the Discord server platform.
“Maybe someone will wake up and say, ‘We really need to fix this,’” Zaid said.
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