Here’s an excerpt from a NYT story about a recent DOJ filing in the case of jailed Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, who was busted for leaking highly classified info in online gamer chatrooms. Turns out he had a much more troubling backstory than initially known:
In an 18-page memo, released before a detention hearing scheduled for Thursday in a Massachusetts federal court, the department’s lawyers argued that Airman Teixeira needed to be detained indefinitely because he posed a “serious flight risk” and might still have information that would be of “tremendous value to hostile nation states.”
Airman Teixeira tapped into vast reservoirs of sensitive information, an amount that “far exceeds what has been publicly disclosed” so far, they wrote.
Prosecutors pointedly questioned Airman Teixeira’s overall state of mind, disclosing that he was suspended from high school in 2018 for alarming comments about the use of Molotov cocktails and other weapons, and trawled the internet for information about mass shootings. He engaged in “regular discussions about violence and murder” on the same social media platform, Discord, that he used to post classified information, the filing said, and he surrounded his bed at his parents’ house with firearms and tactical gear.
The report said Teixeira was also known for making “racial threats” and that local cops flagged him as a risk when he applied for a firearm ID in Massachusetts. So how the fuck did none of this come up before he was given top secret security clearance?
When I was a university student, I once snagged a coveted job as a seasonal worker at the local UPS facility. It paid the princely sum of $8 an hour (Teamsters!), which was WAY more than I earned as a waitress at the Pizza Hut off I-75.
I had to fill out an extensive application, and UPS conducted a background check, verified that I graduated from the high school I said I graduated from and that I was enrolled as a student as I claimed I was. They contacted my past employers (including my dad!) and character references before letting me in the building to load and unload packages from trucks.
That was my only brush with a “deep” background check, so now I’m wondering if UPS is tougher than U.S. intelligence services or whoever hands out top secret security clearances. How did this guy slip through the cracks? This incident, along with Trump absconding with boxes of top secret documents, makes me think the U.S. national security infrastructure needs a major overhaul. Maybe they should ask UPS.
Open thread.
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