By EFE
04 Mar 2024, 22:40 PM EST
Former US military man Jack Teixeira pleaded guilty this Monday to six crimes for the leak of classified Pentagon documents after accepting an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office that will bring him up to 16 years in prison.
The 22-year-old, who worked in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, modified his previous statement at a hearing in Boston, after he had pleaded not guilty in June.
Under the agreement, which carries between 11 and 16 years in prison, Teixeira admitted crimes of “intentional retention and transmission of national defense information” under the United States Espionage Act.
Thanks to the pact, Teixeira will avoid a sentence that, if he had been found guilty by the court, could have reached 60 years in prison.
Teixeira is accused of having 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.
According to prosecutors, the Department of Defense discovered that classified documents were circulating on the Internet in March of last year. The young man was arrested by the FBI in April and has been arrested since then.
The indictment indicates that Teixeira allegedly exposed 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 that he allegedly shared online there was information about a plan by a foreign enemy to attack US forces deployed outside the country.
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