Who can access classified information?

Devlin Barrett and Shane Harris contributed to this report.

What we know about 21-year-old accused of leaking top-secret documents

Updated April 14, 2023 at 10:55 a.m. EDT|Published April 13, 2023 at 6:35 p.m. EDT

A Massachusetts Air National Guard member was arrested by the FBI on April 13 in the investigation of leaks of classified military documents. (Video: WCVB)

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Authorities on Thursday arrested a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard suspected of leaking a trove of classified military intelligence in a case that has transfixed much of official Washington for the past week.

The arrest of Jack Teixeira follows The Post’s account of how detailed intelligence documents about an extraordinary range of subjects found their way onto Discord, an online chat platform popular with gamers, before they circulated across the internet.

Here’s what you should know about Teixeira.

The Discord Leaks

In exclusive interviews with a member of the Discord group where U.S. intelligence documents were shared, The Washington Post learned details of the alleged leaker, “OG.” The Post also obtained a number of previously unreported documents from a trove of images of classified files posted on a private server on the chat app Discord.

How the leak happened: The Washington Post reported that the individual who leaked the information shared documents with a small circle of online friends on the Discord chat platform. This is a timeline of how the documents leaked.

The suspected document leaker: Jack Teixeira, a young member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was charged in the investigation into leaks of hundreds of pages of classified military intelligence. Teixeira told members of the online group that he worked as a technology support staffer at a base on Cape Cod, one member of the Discord server told The Post. Here’s what we learned about the alleged document leaker.

What we learned from the leaked documents: The massive document leak has exposed a range of U.S. government secrets, including spying on allies, the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and the precariousness of Taiwan’s air defenses. It also has ignited diplomatic fires for the White House. Here’s what we’ve learned from the documents.