Pentagon chief: Air National Guardsman’s age not a focus in intel leaks

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Wednesday said age wasn’t an issue in one of the largest U.S. intelligence leaks in decades after a 21-year-old airman was charged in connection with the breach.  

Austin said the age of Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira — the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman charged with leaking highly classified military documents — has not been a focus of the Pentagon’s investigation into how its sensitive and in some cases top secret information ended up online.  

“The vast majority of our military is young,” Austin told reporters at a press conference in Stockholm. “It’s not exceptional that young people are doing important things in our military. That’s really not the issue.”  

Teixeira on Friday was charged under the Espionage Act with unauthorized removal and transmission of classified national defense information. He has not entered a plea. 

He made a brief court appearance Wednesday, though a hearing to determine whether he should remain in jail while awaiting trial was delayed. 

The U.S. government has accused Teixeira of taking classified documents from the Air National Guard 102nd Intelligence Wing in Cape Cod, Mass., the unit where he served, before posting the material to a chat group on Discord. Teixeira was a systems administrator tasked with maintaining the unit’s cyber network and had a top-secret clearance. 

The intelligence leaked — ranging from highly sensitive details on the Ukraine-Russia war to information on U.S. allies and adversaries alike — has set off scrutiny over who has access to classified information and why. Included in that examination is the nation’s youngest service members, who can enlist in the military at 17 years old.

But Austin said a Defense Department investigation into the matter, ordered on Monday, is not focusing on age as the issue, but rather is figuring out what security failures happened that allowed Teixeira to allegedly remove the secretive documents and post them online for several months without drawing attention.   

“The issue is how you responsibly execute or carry out your duties and how you protect the information,” Austin said. “All of us have a requirement to do that, and supervisors have a requirement to make sure that that’s being done.”  

Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson, who spoke alongside Austin, said the U.S. leaks did not come up in an earlier discussion between the two. 

“I can just say that we have a good intelligence cooperation between Sweden and the United States,” he said. “We feel completely sure of the U.S. commitment of handling the situation.” 

In addition to the Pentagon-wide investigation, the Air Force has begun its own look into how each of its command handles classified information, service leaders told lawmakers on Tuesday. 

And Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said he directed the Air Force inspector general to investigate the 102^nd for “anything associated with this leak that could have gone wrong.”  

In the meantime, the Air Force has removed the intelligence mission from the unit.