The Discord Leaks, explained (2024)

In a small server, populated largely by teenage boys united by a common interest in military gear and warfare, users made racist and antisemitic jokes, peddled gory videos and traded conspiracy theories about government agents. Friends said Teixeira shared the closely guarded secrets hoping to impress the users, who looked up to him as their leader. Teixeira also posted intelligence on another, larger server — but his alleged leaking was never discovered by the company.

The Post obtained more than 300 of the documents that Teixeira is accused of posting, as well as long text messages he wrote that contained verbatim transcripts of other documents.

Now, new reporting reveals additional details about Teixeira’s possible motivations, the damage his alleged leaks caused to national security and missed opportunities to potentially catch him earlier, which will air in a new documentary, “The Discord Leaks,” produced by The Washington Post and “Frontline.” It is now available to watch on pbs.org/frontline, PBS streaming platforms and washingtonpost.com.

Here’s what to know about the case.

Jack Teixeira, born in December 2001, grew up in Dighton, Mass., the child of divorced parents. As a middle-schooler, Teixeira read books on World War II aircraft. His interest in warfare found an outlet in video games, including violent first-person shooter games, where friends said Teixeira displayed an arcane knowledge of weapons and military vehicles.

Teixeira enlisted in the Air National Guard in 2019 and was assigned as a computer technician to an intelligence unit at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Teixeira helped maintain computer networks where top-secret intelligence was stored, but he was not an analyst authorized to read the information he might encounter.

The Post investigation raised questions about why Teixeira was able to obtain a top-secret security clearance in the first place. He had been suspended from his high school after making violent threats, including against Black people. Local law enforcement officials were concerned enough that they repeatedly denied Teixeira’s request for a firearms permit. Yet the Defense Department’s background check determined that he could be trusted to handle classified information. That process typically doesn’t closely examine the online lives of applicants.

The FBI located and arrested Teixeira about a week after the leaks became public knowledge.

The Defense Department has declined to answer questions about how Teixeira obtained a top-secret security clearance. Teixeira claimed in a petition for a gun permit that a background investigator was aware of violent threats that he made at his high school and had access to a police report documenting that incident. Experts said that the threats should have raised red flags for the officials who decided to grant him a clearance. A report by the Air Force inspector general found that Teixeira’s unit wasn’t informed about “negative” information turned up in his background check that might have led superiors to monitor him more closely at work.

The Post is suing the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) for refusing to release information about Teixeira’s security clearance that should be public under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Air Force inspector general found significant security lapses at the base where Teixeira worked. According to court records, Teixeira’s superiors caught him on three separate occasions looking at intelligence documents that had nothing to do with his job and ordered him in writing to stop “deep diving” into official secrets. Experts said that such infractions should have been reported to the DCSA as part of a continuous vetting process, meant to identify so-called insider threats that pose a risk of disclosing classified information. The Post’s reporting shows there is no indication that the agency was made aware of Teixeira’s infractions.

In May, the Pentagon temporarily paused Otis Air National Guard Base’s intelligence role and two officers who supervised Teixeira were suspended pending the results of a review by Lt. Gen. Stephen Davis, the Air Force inspector general.

Many of the documents Teixeira is accused of leaking online focused on the Russia-Ukraine war. The documents showed that U.S. officials knew Ukraine was running desperately low on munitions and taking heavy casualties. Daring sabotage missions inside Russia weren’t shaking the public’s resolve, nor had they deterred President Vladimir Putin from continuing to feed his troops into a veritable meat grinder.

The disclosures were remarkable for their breadth. And they were of recent vintage, spanning a period from around February to March, offering deep insights on events that were developing by the day.