By Athena Papakosta

Jack Teixeira was arrested as the “number one” suspect in the leak of classified Pentagon documents. He is only 21 years old and a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. He was allegedly the head of the Thug Shaker Central online group on the Discord app, which is used by online gaming enthusiasts.

On Thursday afternoon, the FBI arrested him and he is expected to be arraigned today. In the images that went around the world, Teixeira is surrounded by heavily armed men and handcuffed. He wears a gray t-shirt and red shorts and his brown hair is cropped short.

United States Attorney General Merrick Garland said that Teixeira will be charged with the unauthorized removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information.

The 21-year-old national guard was said to be the leader of the Thug Shaker Central group whose members were all in their 30s and shared a love of guns, racist memes and video games. A day before his arrest, the American newspaper Washington Post was the first to identify him under the username he had chosen, “OG”. The baton was then picked up by the New York Times who, minutes before the FBI arrested him, revealed his identity.

And the “what’s the source” file may seem to be closing, though questions about the classified documents leak fiasco remain and are serious.

When Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Pat Ryder was asked how it was possible for such a young soldier to have access to such highly sensitive documents and matters of such vital importance as the ongoing war in Ukraine, he replied that it is the nature of the military to trust its very young members with high and sometimes significant levels of responsibility. However, the Pentagon is not sitting idly by and is attempting to revise its policy on safeguarding classified material by focusing on all information distribution lists and assessing how, to whom, where and when information is shared.

Delisting emotionally unstable people with racist and anti-establishment positions might need to be prioritized, one might think, and rightly so, after former members of Thug Shaker Central spoke to the investigative journalism organization Bellingcat and the Washington Post and New York newspapers. Times where they argued that the classified documents were shared in an effort to impress other members of the group rather than to achieve some political goal.

More specifically, according to a teenage member of the group, Teixeira “had a dark view” of the US government, describing it as a “repressive force”. He reportedly believed the same, according to the same source, about both law enforcement and the secret services.

At the same time, the question of how a person managed to remove classified material without arousing suspicion remains equally important. Or to put it another way if the leak shows that the United States was able to know the operational power of Ukraine, Russia and spy on third countries how a 21-year-old boy not only removed, preserved and distributed the documents but circulated them and “free” from platform to platform on the Internet for weeks?

The news for Washington is not good at all and President Biden may say that there is no immediate danger that he is aware of but he is concerned about the incident and rightly so because it is slowly becoming clear that the leak does not just concern and affect the Pentagon but the the American government itself which, because of this case, is now heavily exposed.