A team of three journalists from the New York Times was able to track down and make contact with Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, the alleged leaker of classified documents, even before the authorities did.
In a report published on Sunday, the journalists chronicled their investigative process and how they eventually identified Teixeira. It all started when classified materials appeared on various social media sites, causing Aric Toler to search for the original post. Toler was anonymously tipped off that there was more material on a Discord server geared toward enthusiasts of the video game Minecraft.
Further tracking led to another server named WOW_mao, where Toler discovered over a hundred images uploaded by a user called Lucca. One member of the exclusive Discord channel where the info was posted contacted Toler and informed him that the original poster used the username "OG."
Toler engaged his colleagues Christiaan Trievert and Malachy Browne in the hunt, where they discovered J Teixeira's username by scouring games the members played. The trio then found a match between the countertops in one of Teixeira's Instagram pages and the surface in one of the leaked pictures. Despite attempting to contact Teixeira, his stepfather, retired Air Force master sergeant Thomas Dufault, informed the journalists that "Hes not going to communicate with anybody except an attorney at this point." Law enforcement agencies moved in and arrested on Thursday morning. It was previously known that the authorities had been monitoring the 21-year-old for a few days, and they had planned to arrest him at his workplace, but he failed to show up.
Due to Teixeira being a gun owner, officials were concerned they might face an armed confrontation. The young man is accused of having leaked documents to his Discord friends since last fall, with some documents about troop and supply levels and intelligence regarding the United States' participation in Ukraine and Russian war. Many online users have wondered how someone of his low rank and age was granted access to such high-level material. U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R) has pledged to "examine why this happened, why it went unnoticed for weeks..."
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