This program contains mature content which may not be suitable for all audiences. Viewer discretion is advised.
NARRATOR:
It started on the online chat platform Discord—a post by a person known only as “Lucca.” Classified U.S. intelligence documents, one batch after another. Documents labeled “top secret” soon spilled onto social media. That’s when it made headlines.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Top-secret documents about the war in Ukraine have appeared on social media.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN:
Investigations are underway into the leak of classified Pentagon documents.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The Pentagon is dealing with the fallout from the worst leak of U.S. national security intelligence in many years.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Top-secret documents show Ukraine’s air defense vulnerability.
SAMUEL OAKFORD, The Washington Post:
After this hit the news, we're trying to figure out A, the extent of the leak, and B, obviously, who leaked it. We were looking into Lucca, trying to find traces of him across the web.
NARRATOR:
Sam Oakford is on the visual forensics team at The Washington Post.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
I got in touch with someone else in this Discord server, and we had a video call.
DISCORD USER:
[Voice concealed] I know exactly how he got them, but I can’t in the good conscience of my heart just sell my friend out like that.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
He was clear that Lucca was not the originator of these leaked documents.
DISCORD USER:
[Voice concealed] Oh, this is, this could be useful, I guess.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
He showed me what he said were additional documents that hadn't been in the tranche that Lucca was tied to.
NARRATOR:
Shane Harris is a national security reporter at the Post.
SHANE HARRIS, The Washington Post:
Sam sends me a picture that this source has taken of a document and shared with Sam. Oh, wow. OK. It’s the Chinese spy balloon that had some months earlier drifted over North America. And this appears to be a picture taken from above the spy balloon, which means it could only come from a government surveillance platform. I thought, “How does a teenager have access to highly classified documents?”
NARRATOR:
A few hours later, the source called back.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
This is a recording from a call I had that night.
DISCORD USER:
[Voice concealed] I have some big news. I was able to recover about 350 classified documents that were posted on Discord.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
That’s when this story started.
NARRATOR:
The reporters arranged to meet the source in person.
SHANE HARRIS:
We're sitting on this park bench and this kid arrives. And before we've even had a chance to start introducing ourselves to each other, he says, “So I have this information and I want to give it to you.”
He pops open the laptop, and it’s pretty clear within a minute or two that this kid has an astonishing range of classified documents.
NARRATOR:
The leak was far bigger than anyone had understood: more than 300 pages that included some of the most highly classified information in the U.S. government, from secret Pentagon assessments of the war in Ukraine, to revelations about Iran’s nuclear program, to scenarios about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
SHANE HARRIS:
And that’s when he starts to tell us the story of a group of friends who he made online during the pandemic in a Discord server that they called Thug Shaker Central. And he described one individual who, over the course of many months, had shared hundreds and hundreds of classified documents.
NARRATOR:
As the reporters were returning home with the documents, the FBI was closing in on a suspect.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Jack Teixeira.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Jack Douglas Teixeira.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Jack Teixeira.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The man suspected of leaking highly classified military documents has been found.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
That’s him in the red shorts there. The 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member was taken into custody earlier today.
SHANE HARRIS:
This 21-year old Air National Guardman is alleged to have disclosed hundreds of top-secret government documents online to his gaming buddies. Why did he do it? How did he do it? What drove him? Who is he?
NARRATOR:
Over the next six months, reporters at The Washington Post would investigate Jack Teixeira’s world. It largely played out online.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
Our whole team was working on this, creating networks, basically, of people based on their social media profiles because they interacted in some way with Jack or someone he was connected to.
NARRATOR:
Chris Dehganpoor specializes in tracking down sources online. He worked as an information security engineer at a gaming platform before becoming an investigative reporter at the Post.
CHRIS DEHGHANPOOR, The Washington Post:
The first thing I tried to do was to find a Steam profile. Steam is an online gaming network that is very popular with users on Discord, and if we could find his friend list, we could start to kind of build out a network of other users that he was interacting with.
Here’s a list of people that both Jack and Mr. Lucca were friends with. Out of the many friend requests that I sent out, only a handful actually responded. One of those happened to be the user that is named Crow. After about a half hour of going back and forth they revealed that they had dated. For me, that definitely set alarm bells off. What are the odds of one of the first people that kind of replies to my random friend request the day of happens to be someone that dated Jack? It seemed astronomical that that was actually happening.
NARRATOR:
But her story checked out. In a series of contacts with “Crow,” the Post reporters began to find out more about her and her relationship with Jack Teixeira.
SHANE HARRIS:
They met online. They were very close during the pandemic. I get the feeling that when she’s telling this story about Jack, she’s speaking as somebody who also went down some very deep rabbit holes and went to some very dark places. She became a neo-Nazi because of people she met online. She wants to tell her story as somebody saying, “Look, I made bad choices in my life."
NARRATOR:
She agreed to go on camera if we used her online name and her whole face wasn’t shown. She said she no longer has anything to do with the neo-Nazi movement.
CROW:
No, I don't believe any of that anymore. I've realized as time went on that those views were just inherently false, but before then I realized that it was potentially going to get me killed to stay in those communities.
SHANE HARRIS:
Is that fear the reason that you don't want to be identified in this interview?
CROW:
Partially, yeah. I don't think anyone would seek me out to hurt me, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
NARRATOR:
Crow says she met Jack Teixeira online.
CROW:
I think the first time I remember encountering him, we were on a server about guns, and gear, and Russian stuff. And I think I asked him some questions about what he was talking about, because as much as I like guns, I don't know as much as some of these people, and it got to a point where I trusted him quite a bit.
SHANE HARRIS:
What were some of his general political views of the day?
CROW:
He was patriotic. He liked America. I guess, best way I could possibly describe him would be kind of like a libertarian.
He had strong opinions about everything. He was not a neo-Nazi, but definitely conservative, really supported gun rights, First Amendment rights. So it was definitely a plus to me that he was fine with my beliefs.
He texted me this big, long, emotional thing asking me to date him, telling me that I was the last part of this dystopian world that he liked. He knew everything about my life.
NARRATOR:
Crow says they never met in person, but they had an online relationship for about a year.
CROW:
I think in front of his friends, he kind of put on this front of, “Oh, I don’t really care.” Way more typically masculine and conservative. I think he wanted them to think of him pretty highly. But when you’re one-on-one with him, he was much more of a genuinely sweet person. He loved dragons and dinosaurs and stuff. Since he was a kid, he always wanted to ride a dragon. Looking back on it, it’s kind of childish, but that was a side of him you never really saw when you were talking to him.
NARRATOR:
Jack Teixeira’s family would not speak on the record. But the Post reporters were able to piece together an outline of his childhood. Teixeira grew up in Dighton, Massachusetts, a tranquil corner of the state.
SHANE HARRIS:
So you see family photos of him when he’s little. He looks just like a typical, ordinary little kid. He seems to come from a big family. Here he is playing a game online. He looks about 6 years old in this picture. He was obsessed as a young kid with military weaponry and hardware and World War II airplanes. He was a bright kid by all accounts. In middle school he made the honor roll.
We understand he’s reasonably close to his parents. He lives at the home of his mother and stepfather, but he’s also close with his dad. We know that in middle school he started playing Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto with friends online.
He gets to high school, and it seems like maybe this is a period where there’s significant change in his life. And he starts to have problems.
NARRATOR:
It was a time he would still talk about when he began dating Crow after high school.
CROW:
There were many late-night calls where he would rant to me about school, how much he hated his teacher and how much he hated some people, and he hated the principal, and how he wishes he could have shot up the school, how he should have done it. Just stuff like that.
SHANE HARRIS:
His sophom*ore year, there is an incident at the school where there are two students who say that Jack tells them he has a molotov co*cktail in his backpack, and what would they do if he threw one down the hallway? The kids are alarmed. They go to officials and ultimately the Dighton Police Department investigates this.
NARRATOR:
FRONTLINE and The Washington Post obtained the report of the subsequent police investigation.
SHANE HARRIS:
There are witness statements that a number of the students give, that document all of these things that they said that they’ve heard Jack say, including the threats that he’s made about killing Black people.
The police meet with Jack and he tries to say, “I was just talking about a video game.”
Ultimately Jack is suspended from school for one day and required to take a psychological risk assessment before returning to class.
DISCORD PROMOTIONAL AD:
We wanted to build a place where you could game, talk and ultimately belong, so we built Discord, and you loved it.
NARRATOR:
By the time Teixeira got into trouble in high school, the chat platform Discord was surging in popularity with gamers.
DISCORD PROMOTIONAL AD:
You made Discord into a home, a place for you and your friends to hang out in.
NARRATOR:
Discord was started in 2015 by game developers Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy.
JASON CITRON:
We came up with this idea of what if we built from scratch an amazing voice and text chat experience for people that play multiplayer video games? And that’s what we built, and it’s called Discord.
NARRATOR:
It quickly evolved and became a place for users to create communities, known as “servers,” with no advertising and little oversight, relying largely on users to moderate problematic content.
DISCORD SERVER CHATS, 2017
MALE VOICE:
It’s going to happen at UVA in front of the Jefferson statue. We're going to march to the monument with the torches.
NARRATOR:
As the company grew, it came under fire when white supremacists began recruiting and organizing on its servers, most infamously for the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
John Redgrave is Discord’s head of Trust and Safety.
SHANE HARRIS:
After the Charlottesville riots and the Unite the Right rally in 2017, it was found that there were people who were organizing on Discord.
JOHN REDGRAVE, V.P., Trust & Safety, Discord:
Look, the Unite the Right rally was a really challenging moment for Discord. I was not part of the company at that time, but it was the impetus for Discord to build a trust and safety team.
We have 150 million people using Discord every month. That’s billions of interactions. So the scale of this challenge is immense.
NARRATOR:
The company has defended itself in the wake of the intelligence leaks and the ongoing problems with extremism, saying they represent isolated bad actors on a platform designed for privacy and community.
JOHN REDGRAVE:
We have taken the stance that a lot of these spaces are like text messaging your friends and your loved ones. And it’s inappropriate for us to violate people’s privacy, and we don't have the level of precision to do so when it comes to detection.
To me, we're a city. Discord is a city. We have all these people who are trying to find friends in their city and they're going and playing “sports.” They might be gaming, they might be studying together. In any city you are going to have problematic pockets.
NARRATOR:
Sam Oakford tracked down one of Jack Teixeira’s friends from Discord. He wanted to be identified by his online name, “Pucki.”
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
Pucki is someone that I heard about very early on. It took us a long time, many, many months, to track him down and identify him by name and then get in touch and then convince him to meet with us.
NARRATOR:
Pucki is now 19. This is the first time he’s spoken on camera.
MALE CAMERAPERSON:
All right. And we’re rolling.
PUCKI:
Do not disturb. There we go.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
Let’s start when you first encountered Discord as a platform.
PUCKI:
I think it was in seventh grade. I was still using Skype at that point, and my really good friend at the time, we're like, “We should ditch Skype because everybody’s on Discord.” I formed a habit of being there a lot, texting but also speaking. And then June 2020, that’s when I joined Oxide.
NARRATOR:
Oxide is a YouTube channel featuring Russian guns, body armor and military hardware. Viewers who like the content can then join a server on Discord: Oxide Hub, which in 2020 had thousands of members—including Jack Teixeira.
PUCKI:
We were stuck inside that summer, so we were just all online playing games. So I searched for other places to be, and then that’s what brought me to Oxide. And Jack was there, and we hit it off. Personally I remember him being—He was a cool guy.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
And the number of coronavirus cases jumped by nearly 5,000 here in the United States over the past 24 hours as testing has expanded—
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Teenagers have really lost out when it comes to peer relationships.
NARRATOR:
It was during the early days of the COVID pandemic that Jack Teixeira’s friend group was coalescing on Discord. Charles says he was around 13 when he met Teixeira on Oxide Hub. He and one of his parents agreed he could be interviewed on the condition his identity be concealed and we use his middle name.
CHARLES:
I moved to a new school, and it had shut down immediately due to COVID restrictions. I had no friends and was locked at home. And because I was locked at home, that led me to Discord. And Discord is where I eventually met Jack Teixeira. And after some time, you play so many games with someone, you have good moments with those people, that you kind of form a bond with them.
CROW:
We talked a lot in Oxide Hub, but it was a big group of people, so it wasn’t like talking one-on-one and you would occasionally DM them privately.
NARRATOR:
But their online conversations had a darker side.
PUCKI:
We took joy in being offensive. It was something that made us tighter as friends, like us against the world.
We would talk about how much we hated a race, whether that be Jews or Blacks. Hispanics or Canadians. It could be anything. You’d be like, “Dude, screw those people,” and people would be like, “Yeah.” And whether it was serious or not, we didn't care. It was funny and during such a time where we were so far removed from society because of COVID, it was so easy to fall into that hole of just hating everything.
CHARLES:
A lot of older people don’t understand how gross younger people’s humor can be, and they don't understand just how disturbing younger people’s perceptions of what can be joked and not joked about is.
NARRATOR:
Like many large public Discord servers, Oxide Hub had its own moderators responsible for policing content.
PUCKI:
At some point, Oxide’s moderation team, they want to crack down on offensive content—offensive for this being racially motivated images, memes. Because it was a public server, they didn’t want anything too edgy. So they started cracking down on this content.
CROW:
And then Pucki, he made a smaller server and invited a bunch of people who used to be active in the voice chats.
PUCKI:
And then this is where you could say the core members became solidified with each other.
CROW:
Ninety-nine percent of my time was in there.
SHANE HARRIS:
What was the role that Jack played in the group?
CROW:
He was pretty well-liked by everyone. He was someone that if you saw them join the VC, and they were just sitting in there alone, it would fill up really quickly with other people just wanting to talk to him.
CHARLES:
He was an awesome guy to hang out around. Anytime he entered the room, mood changed. Stuff’s going down, this is going to be fun. We're going to have a good night.
NARRATOR:
After the George Floyd protests dominated the news in the summer of 2020, the content on Pucki’s server became even more racist and violent.
VIDEO CHAT SCREEN FROM PUCKI’S SERVER, 2020
CROW:
In the calls people would be in their military gear yelling a lot about Black people, about police. There was some of “just keep burning stuff down.” There was one day where people joined the call and just started doing pushups to prepare for the end times. [Laughs]
This is a screen recording of the group gaming together. Jack Teixeira used his online name, “The Excalibur Effect.”
PUCKI:
Gore was posted. You’d post videos of jihadi beheadings and things like that, or cartel killings. You’d be like, “Dude, look at this guy getting his head chopped off.” It was “cool.”
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
What do you think about this now?
PUCKI:
I’m definitely not proud of it at all. It’s embarrassing, and it’s quite frankly humiliating to speak about it now, but I’m willing to.
SHANE HARRIS:
Do you think that the community Jack was in on Discord nudged him closer to making this bad decision that he ultimately made?
CROW:
Yeah, I think so, yeah. I think it was just the whole psychology of being in an online community like that. I mean, there’s a term, chronically online, where you lose touch of how interacting with people in real life is, and real consequences and real issues in the world, those just go away.
SHANE HARRIS:
In the summer of 2020, Jack graduates high school. That’s of course the first year of the pandemic. He actually skips high school graduation because he’s off to basic training at Lackland Air Force Base.
He goes on to start taking the coursework that he needs to become a cyber transport specialist.
NARRATOR:
It was a low-level IT job, but it required a security clearance and a background check.
CROW:
He was a little bit worried they were going to, in their interview, bring up, “Hey, we found this Discord account,” or “We found this Discord server.” At that time, he did become less active in Discord. And he was very worried about keeping the things he was doing private and safe.
SHANE HARRIS:
What was he specifically worried that the background investigation might turn up with regards to Discord?
CROW:
There was a lot of racist talk on that server. There was a lot of talk of killing ATF agents, killing different government officials, committing acts of terrorism. Things that are probably not great for someone in the military to be saying. So I think that’s probably what he was worried about.
NARRATOR:
But Teixeira was investigated, and ultimately approved for security clearance by the Department of Defense.
SHANE HARRIS:
One big question we have right now is how did Jack Teixeira get a security clearance? If we’re looking at Jack Teixeira and all the things that he posted online, the racist, violent comments, the memes, the imagery, and the fact that he ultimately is accused of leaking hundreds of classified documents, it’s like “OK, well, wait a minute.” There should have been red flags along the way.
NARRATOR:
The Department of Defense declined to give an interview or answer questions about Jack Teixeira.
A Pentagon review found that there wasn’t a “single point of failure” in the leaks, but said improvements were needed to the security clearance process and how classified information is safeguarded.
Shane Harris spoke to retired Lt. Gen. Scott Rice, former director of the Air National Guard.
GEN. L. SCOTT RICE (Ret.), Former Director, Air National Guard:
All the checks and balances of the system and the bureaucracy looked into Jack Teixeira’s background, and he was vetted and approved for that type of clearance.
SHANE HARRIS:
Jack, we were told from friends, was very obsessed with violent videos, violent content. It’s a picture of a really dark, violence-prone, racist gun lover, basically. Should the military vetting process have caught all of these aspects of his personality?
SCOTT RICE:
Yes and no. The military vetting system is pretty robust and it catches a lot of stuff. He was a young high school kid, took a test, did very, very well on it. And so, yes, the system vets and finds a lot of these things, but again, it’s not perfect, and some things come through.
NARRATOR:
Since the Cold War, the security clearance protocol has involved extensive interviews with people who know applicants well—in real life.
SHANE HARRIS:
You can’t really know Jack Teixeira unless you’ve also looked at the amount of time that he spent online, because it was a huge part of his life. So they have this blind spot to Jack Teixeira. They don’t know all the things that he’s saying and doing online.
NARRATOR:
To receive his security clearance, Teixeira would have had to fill out a detailed questionnaire: the SF-86.
MARK ZAID, National security attorney:
This is the current SF-86. A hundred and thirty-six pages long. This is literally mine from 2019.
NARRATOR:
Mark Zaid is a lawyer who has represented hundreds of people going through the security clearance process.
MARK ZAID:
Now this form has changed over time. There’s nothing in the form that asks for, “What are your user names on different social media platforms? What social media platforms are you on?” The government had no way to do a predictive analysis of the risk that it was adopting in granting him a security clearance.
SHANE HARRIS:
So let me present some instances from his background when he was online, and you tell me, would these negatively affect his ability to get a clearance? Making racist jokes.
MARK ZAID:
It depends. So every answer I'm always going to give on a clearance case is always “it depends,” because that’s the way. But yes.
SHANE HARRIS:
Threatening, even if in a what you might consider jokey way, to kill a federal law enforcement officer.
MARK ZAID:
Yes, absolutely of concern for a security clearance.
SHANE HARRIS:
Coming up with imagined scenarios for how you would kill a federal law enforcement officer.
MARK ZAID:
Absolutely a concern. You know, if that very simple question, “What social media sites are you on?” had been asked on the form, and one source from that social media site had been obtained—
SHANE HARRIS:
He might never have gotten a security clearance.
MARK ZAID:
He might never have gotten a security clearance.
NARRATOR:
By October 2021, Jack Teixeira was working as an IT specialist with the 102nd Intelligence Wing at the Otis Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts.
SHANE HARRIS:
To the extent that you understand it, what is Jack Teixeira’s job?
SCOTT RICE:
For all practical purposes, he’s a technician. He fixes and repairs systems, maybe computer systems, hardware, software, file servers, data storage, all of those parts and pieces that sit behind, in front of or next to an intelligence analyst that they use as their tools.
SHANE HARRIS:
They’re in there working on the system. You can’t help but see classified information.
SCOTT RICE:
Correct. Absolutely. And so you would think that a technician doesn’t need access to top-secret information, but they’re going to see, touch and feel top-secret information all the time.
NARRATOR:
Teixeira was working in a “SCIF”—a secure facility where personal electronics are banned. He would sometimes work unsupervised at night, maintaining air conditioning units and answering phones.
SHANE HARRIS:
I mean, it must’ve been intoxicating for him. He’s working in this highly sensitive facility, safeguarding the nation’s secrets, and then he goes home and hops onto Discord and it’s a racist, paranoid, antisemitic, free-for-all. It’s like he’s living this double life.
NARRATOR:
Around this time on Pucki’s Discord server, Teixeira was posting videos mimicking first-person shooters. One video threatened violence against Jews and Black people.
JACK TEIXEIRA:
Jews scam, n------ rape and I mag dump.
PUCKI:
I was there when it was posted. I remember it being posted, and I was like, “What are you shooting?”
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
Was that out of the ordinary, or was that something that—?
PUCKI:
That sort of rhetoric was common. All pretense aside, it was racist. But if you were in the know, it was funny and you were included.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
You're talking about your politics, were they a sort of conspiratorial worldview?
PUCKI:
Yes. “Jews rule the world.” This was huge in the pandemic. The vaccines, like all these companies, they've got Jewish CEOs. We can’t trust it.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
So Jack is one of the people talking about this?
PUCKI:
Definitely.
NARRATOR:
Pucki says he now regrets the antisemitism, hate speech and conspiracy theories.
At the end of 2021, with COVID restrictions waning, he says he began spending less time on Discord. Control of the server was given over to Teixeira.
The server name eventually changed to Thug Shaker Central, a racist and hom*ophobic reference to gay p*rnography.
PUCKI:
I would hate to describe the server as a cult of personality, but it became very centered around Jack’s humor and his point of view.
NARRATOR:
Jack Teixeira was older than most of the group, many of whom were young teenagers.
CROW:
The more extremist he got and the smaller his circle got, he felt it was his duty to be this father figure, to be this man that would tell them what’s going on and had all this information.
NARRATOR:
By this time, Crow says they’d broken off their relationship and she had left the server.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
A really key element was the way that the server became smaller and smaller over time. It wasn’t only that there were fewer people in it, but there were certain types of people who made the toxicity levels rise and rise.
PUCKI:
Him being the owner, he would have the final say in what happens, so people began leaving, getting banned. Jack would ban them. It wasn’t like silencing people because we thought their opinions were bad. It was, “This guy isn't funny,” or “He’s a normie, get him out of here.”
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
Huh. It sounds a little cutthroat.
PUCKI:
Yeah. It was down to maybe like 20 guys. When you have a group who share similar views, it will progressively become edgier, darker, brutal. And it’s easy to become locked in that echo chamber.
NARRATOR:
Discord says that it shut down one of Jack Teixeira’s user accounts for hateful content, but that he had two others, and the reason it took no action against Thug Shaker Central was because nobody reported it.
SHANE HARRIS:
In the case of Thug Shaker Central, Jack Teixeira was a moderator. In the city analogy, it’s Jack’s house, is essentially that server.
JOHN REDGRAVE:
Yeah, he builds his house.
SHANE HARRIS:
We found Thug Shaker Central violated several other terms of services—hate speech, images of gore, threats of violence. These are all things that we've documented in our reporting as well. Why were these particular kids allowed to continue sharing this kind of material for more than a year?
JOHN REDGRAVE:
This comes down to our ability to identify what’s happening in these spaces. We rely on user reports. We rely on third parties to help us with intelligence. None of that happened here.
SHANE HARRIS:
Well, and none of it was likely to happen because they were all part of this community. I mean, if one of them objected to racist and antisemitic comments being made routinely, they might’ve flagged it, but they didn’t because they were all in on that. So what you’re saying is that the company has no way of monitoring for that kind of content on its own?
JOHN REDGRAVE:
We require that people are helping to keep Discord safe. We do scan spaces in particular for child sex abuse material. That is unambiguously bad. But when it comes to other classes of abuse, we all need to collectively think about are we just diving into someone’s privacy? So in our city, this is the difference between someone who has a listening device in your apartment versus not. And it’s certainly our choice to not put that listening device in, in those private spaces.
NARRATOR:
In early 2022—
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The crisis between Ukraine and Russia is reaching a tipping point—
NARRATOR:
—Jack Teixeira started focusing his Discord posts on world events.
PUCKI:
I’m not sure how to explain it. It was just a, “Hey, guys, new channel.” At first the channel was for the war. And then Jack was like, “Hey, I have this. I have these numbers.” And we’re like, “Sure, dude, post it.” So then he started posting them.
NARRATOR:
As the war in Ukraine progressed, Pucki says Teixeira started sharing classified information on Thug Shaker Central.
PUCKI:
It just sort of started with casualty numbers and equipment losses from both sides in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. It was very basic, just text. “These are the real numbers, guys,” from wherever. I can’t remember if he said it was from the DOD or anything like that. I am pretty sure he did.
I likened it to him wanting us to be prepared for whatever the world is going to throw at us. We spoke about the conspiracies and how we distrusted government. This was just another iteration of that. We didn't trust the news, and we were getting it from the source.
SHANE HARRIS:
He was taking notes from the documents at work, possibly using speech to text on his phone to transcribe them. But he’s now leaving work and coming back with whole swaths of intelligence from reports, much of it verbatim, and sharing them with friends online.
NARRATOR:
Discord chat transcripts released by federal investigators show that Teixeira was in fact already leaking classified information before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
Jack gives someone who lives in an unnamed foreign city, presumably in Europe, a heads-up that there will be people coming. He uses very vulgar language. He says there’ll be a wave of N-words from a city in Ukraine soon, an allusion to the impending war. And he says, “I’ll elaborate more when I get home.”
So this is significant for multiple reasons. It’s Jack appearing to give a preview of the invasion of Ukraine based on classified material. It’s him talking to a foreign national about this.
NARRATOR:
The Post reporters found that Teixeira’s audience on Discord was wider than just Thug Shaker Central, and he was regularly having exchanges like this on a much larger, public server, called Abinavski’s Exclusion Zone.
Sam Oakford spent weeks mapping Teixeira’s posts and contacts on the Abinavski server, a community of military enthusiasts and gamers with more than 600 members around the world.
He found one of Abinavski’s moderators in Arizona.
JEREMIAH:
Jack first really appeared around when the war started, so February of 2022. He had joined the server before then, but never really talked. I found that out when I looked back through his messages. It is a little odd that he just all of a sudden started talking right around the start of the war.
NARRATOR:
Jeremiah agreed to be interviewed, on the condition we use only his first name.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
So Jack started posting more over time?
JEREMIAH:
Yeah, he started making, like, biweekly to weekly updates when the war was more active, almost daily in some cases, especially early on, like May and June of 2022.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
So you were getting a real window into what was going on in the world related to the war?
JEREMIAH:
Oh, absolutely. It was very fascinating, especially being so interested in things like that. As someone who likes history, it’s one of those things where it’s like you're getting direct access to firsthand information, which is extremely hard to get, especially when you're living through something. But being able to see it immediately was just very fascinating and a little bit exhilarating.
NARRATOR:
Jeremiah says Teixeira had an eager audience at Abinavski, and that he even took requests for classified information.
JEREMIAH:
He had said that, “Oh, if you live in this country, you can kind of ask. If I have anything on it, I'll tell you.” So you’d have people from all over the place being like, “Hey, do you know anything that was going on about this event in my country?” And if he had anything, he’d kind of tell them.
My thought the whole time was someone else will report him. It’ll happen eventually, there’s no way. And it just never did. He kept posting and posting and posting.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
Did you consider reporting Jack at any point?
JEREMIAH:
I did. I had times where I'm like, “I probably should report him.” You know, I was 18, I was stupid, and I was kind of just wanting to look at information.
A lot of people told him, “Hey, you do realize it’s illegal, right?” He was like, “Yeah, I know. I don't care.” I thought he was an absolute idiot and was definitely going to get arrested.
NARRATOR:
Air Force memos show that on more than one occasion, he was caught in the act.
SHANE HARRIS:
It says that Jack Teixeira had been observed taking notes on classified intelligence information in the SCIF. He was observed putting a note in his pocket.
NARRATOR:
He was told to stop.
Then, a month later, another warning.
SHANE HARRIS:
But then they go on to offer him essentially a promotion to become an analyst. And it says that he “declined the training opportunity at this time.”
NARRATOR:
And then, three months later, Teixeira was caught viewing classified content without authorization.
The Air Force declined to give an interview but this week published its own investigation which pointed to systemic failures in the handling of classified information and strongly criticized the “culture of complacency” at Otis Air National Guard Base. It found that several individuals knew about Teixeira’s breaches of protocol but intentionally failed to report the full details, and that a lack of oversight made it possible to print classified documents without detection.
The commander of the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis was relieved of his command; 14 others were disciplined for dereliction of duties.
SHANE HARRIS:
If you were a supervisor in that base, or any base, and you saw a young man who was an IT tech looking at top-secret information, what would your reaction have been?
SCOTT RICE:
I would come down on somebody that’s going down a pathway that is not within their job set. I would come down on them very hard and say, “This is not appropriate,” and pull them off the line.
NARRATOR:
Documents from federal investigators show that by January 2023, Teixeira was concerned that he may be discovered transcribing classified information at work. He decided to switch his approach.
SHANE HARRIS:
He removes documents from work, takes them home and takes photographs of them with his phone, and he uploads those. And he uploads more than 300 documents like that.
JEREMIAH:
We knew it was illegal when he was still just typing everything out. But not pictures of documents, which is fully incriminating.
NARRATOR:
Feb. 28, 2023. That evening, a teenager at home in Southern California logged into Discord and initiated the fall of Jack Teixeira. He went by the name “Lucca.”
CROW:
He was naïve, immature, kind of the whole nine yards of a kid.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
Lucca was one of the younger members of Thug Shaker Central. He was someone who had a reputation for s---posting, what you might say, and he would post things in a reckless way. So it set off everything that would happen over the next month.
NARRATOR:
Lucca reposted images of dozens of the classified documents originally leaked to Thug Shaker. They were sourced from nearly every U.S. intelligence agency: never-before-seen Ukrainian battlefield assessments; locations where the CIA has recruited sources; the technology the U.S. uses to track Russian forces.
CROW:
He probably just thought they were a funny meme, and posted them.
NARRATOR:
Within days, another user forwarded the posts to another server.
The leak was becoming a spill.
Jack Teixeira wrote to his friends on Abinavski.
JEREMIAH:
He messaged on March 19 about how he’s done posting. And then the thread disappears. So he must’ve deleted it.
NARRATOR:
Then, in early April, the classified documents were anonymously posted on 4chan, a site popular with far-right extremists.
Soon afterwards, they appeared on a pro-Russian Telegram channel.
SHANE HARRIS:
As these documents are now popping up like mushrooms all over the internet, Jack hears from one of his friends in Abinavski’s Exclusion Zone that he thinks he’s seen some of his “thingies” on the internet, meaning classified material.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
So this when it kind of hits the fan for Jack.
NARRATOR:
On the evening of April 6, the news broke that the Pentagon and the FBI were trying to identify the source of the leaks.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Top-secret documents about the war in Ukraine have appeared—
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The Pentagon is investigating the leak of classified documents detailing U.S. and NATO military strategy—
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Classified Pentagon documents are being discovered posted on social media.
NARRATOR:
Teixeira took drastic action.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
Once this story was in the news, Jack attempted to delete anything that he could control. Jack controlled Thug Shaker Central. He nuked it on April 7. The same day, the FBI actually contacts Discord for the first time.
JOHN REDGRAVE:
I get a phone call. I immediately stand up a team of people. We started to take action while also collaborating with different law enforcement agencies.
NARRATOR:
Classified material had been leaking on Discord for more than a year, but it had gone undetected until now.
JOHN REDGRAVE:
No users at all reported anything about this to us.
SHANE HARRIS:
How many servers were found to have classified documents moving through them, as you described it?
JOHN REDGRAVE:
I don't know the answer off the top of my head.
SHANE HARRIS:
Is it possible you all don't know how many servers these documents popped up in?
JOHN REDGRAVE:
Well, look, we're constantly trying to evolve how we can identify these things, but without knowing what is and is not classified and without having some way to essentially detect that proactively, we can’t say definitively where classified documents go. And that’s true of every single tech company. This is not a Discord problem, this is an internet problem. We have no capability to identify when a classified document has potentially been leaked.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
So the moment Teixeira deleted Thug Shaker Central, it could not be recovered? Anything in it?
JOHN REDGRAVE:
Could not be recovered.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
So that means that it’s gone and you can’t recover that under any circ*mstances?
JOHN REDGRAVE:
There is no way for us to recover information that’s deleted by a user on Discord.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
So in essence, he was successful in a limited way in covering his tracks there by deleting the server?
JOHN REDGRAVE:
I don’t think he was successful, given the fact that lots of screenshots have appeared.
NARRATOR:
Teixeira could delete the Thug Shaker server, but he didn’t have the same power over Abinavski.
SAMUEL OAKFORD:
He’s running through various ways he can most efficiently clear up what he did on Abinavski.
JEREMIAH:
He had asked me to go back and delete anything he might’ve posted outside the thread in February of 2022. He had also said, “Don’t tell anyone,” which I didn’t. But I immediately started taking screenshots of things and just kind of collecting information in case it was ever needed.
SHANE HARRIS:
So he’s telling people, “Delete anything that has anything to do with me. If anyone comes talking to you, don’t tell them anything.”
NARRATOR:
In the days that followed, investigators say Teixeira destroyed electronics equipment, adopted a new email address and got a new phone number.
SHANE HARRIS:
You see him in these days understanding that the walls are closing in. He knows people are looking for him, and he’s trying to delete the evidence that might lead to his door.
NARRATOR:
Federal agents were getting closer to Teixeira, and the word was getting out among people who had known him online.
CROW:
I knew a few days before it ever hit national news. I used to be very good friends with Mr. Lucca and I was still close friends with people kind of connected to him, and I heard that they were looking into him for classified information. Lucca was the first person who got visited by any law enforcement.
NARRATOR:
On April 10, 2023, the FBI interviewed Lucca. He told them that a clean-cut white male named Jack who lived in Massachusetts and worked for the U.S. Air National Guard was the source of the leaks. Three days later, federal agents moved in on Jack Teixeira. He was waiting for them on the back porch of his mother’s house, reading a Bible.
CHARLES:
Last thing he ever said to us, he said, “I’m sorry guys. I really wish this would never happen. I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed that this day would never come, but now it’s just in God’s hand. I love you all.” And then that was basically it.
NARRATOR:
Jack Teixeira was charged with six counts of retaining and transmitting classified national defense information. The indictment said that what he leaked “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation.”
Nobody else has been charged in relation to the leaks.
Teixeira has pled not guilty, and remains incarcerated pending his trial. If convicted, he could face decades in prison.
SHANE HARRIS:
If you look at the whole narrative, then, of Jack, there were so many points where he could have been flagged or interrogated further or even stopped, and they just don't happen.
MARK ZAID:
Once you start tracking back, you see failure, failure, failure, failure, failure. There were countless missed opportunities, literally from the outset. And as a result, we have one of the worst leak cases in modern times.
CROW:
To me, it felt like a mix of his ego and ideology, and just all of it blended together. Because when you’re on Discord that much, you lose a lot of what normal socialization is. I genuinely just think he never thought they’d come for him.
