Alongside the appearance of Jack Teixeira in court, the justification for his arrest has been released.
Known as an affidavit, the document is eight pages long. It is written by the FBI agent who led the investigation which resulted in Mr Teixeira’s arrest, and it contains plenty of interesting new information.
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The trail leading to Jack Teixeira
The first key part to highlight in the document is point 15. It reveals that the FBI tracked down and interviewed another member of the small closed chat group on the “Discord” social media platform.
The interview was conducted at the beginning of the week. The user has been identified only as “user 1”.
The FBI says the user told their agents that the chat group was used to “discuss geopolitical affairs and current and historical wars”.
Posting photographs of classified documents
The following point, paragraph 16, reveals that the documents themselves were initially not posted on the chat group.
Instead, paragraphs of text were published. But, by January this year, actual photographs of the classified documents began to appear.
Identifying the suspect
In paragraph 18 we learn that the user they interviewed told them that he spoke to the man now identified as Mr Teixeira various times by video call, voice call and via a chat function. The FBI concluded that visual identification would be possible.
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It also alleges that the individual, now believed to be Mr Teixeira, had become concerned that he would be discovered making transcriptions of the classified documents prompting him to take them home to photograph them.
Paragraph 21 give hints at how the FBI managed to identify Mr Teixeira.
It claims that information provided by their witness (user 1) allowed them to access billing information for the Discord platform. This gave them a name – Jack Teixeira – and an address in Massachusetts.
An identity line-up
Paragraph 22 reveals that the FBI asked their witness to take part in an unusual identity line-up. They had accessed Mr Teixeira’s driving license. They showed this alongside other random driving license photos.
Their witness – user 1 – identified Mr Teixeira.
Top level security clearance
Paragraph 24 is key.
It details Mr Teixeira’s security clearance. He had held Top Secret clearance since 2021 and clearance for even more secure documents classified as “Sensitive Compartmentalised Access (SCI)”.
Sensitive Compartmentalised Information relates to information obtained from intelligence sources. It could contain methods used, or analytical processes. It is highly classified.