In fact, he joined the Air National Guard even before he graduated from high school. But what’s clear is during his high school career, he was very focused on joining the military. On the pages of his high school yearbook, he doesn’t show up many places. michael barbaroĪnd what people who went to high school with him say is he was kind of an awkward, quiet kid. His stepdad was a master sergeant in the Air Force and actually worked at the same base where Teixeira is accused of stealing documents. His mom ran a floral business out of their house. And he seems to have had a normal, middle class, suburban upbringing. It’s conservative, voted for President Trump in both 2016 and ‘20, which is fairly unusual for Massachusetts. My colleagues went to the tiny town where he grew up, which is southwest of Boston. And so my colleagues and I start digging around trying to find more. He’s a pretty low ranking member of the Air National Guard at a base in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Teixeira is an employee of the United States Air Force National Guard. archived recording 1įBI agents took Teixeira into custody earlier this afternoon without incident. Today, the Justice Department arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira. The FBI arrests a suspect, and they don’t tell us much.

dave phillipsĪt first we found very little. And ever since, you have been trying to understand this suspect’s back story and how he ends up getting these documents in the first place.

The latest leak of US military secrets, this time by a member of the National Guard, has once again raised a familiar question, why do so many low level government workers have access to so many classified documents? The reason according to my colleague, Dave Philipps, is that such access was supposed to solve a problem, not create one.ĭave, one week ago exactly, there is an arrest, in this case, of this major leak of dozens of pages of secret military documents that have now been splashed across the front pages of papers around the world and has become a major embarrassment for the US. michael barbaroįrom “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email with any questions. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. This transcript was created using speech recognition software. Transcript Why Low-Ranking Soldiers Have Access to Top Secret Documents The arrest of a junior airman in the leaking of classified intelligence opened a debate about the volume of people with security clearances.

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