Air Force yanks intel mission from Jack Teixeira’s unit as leak probed

WASHINGTON — The Air Force has stripped the Air National Guard’s 102nd Intelligence Wing of its mission as the service investigates how 21-year-old Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira allegedly accessed and published dozens of classified documents.

“The 102nd Intelligence Wing is not currently performing its assigned intelligence mission,” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told The Post on Wednesday.

“The mission has been temporarily reassigned to other organizations within the Air Force.”

The Air Force Inspector General’s Office is probing the Cape Cod-based unit to determine what — if anything — could have been done to prevent the damaging disclosure.

Specifically, the watchdog will look at “overall compliance with policy, procedures, and standards, including the unit environment and compliance at the 102nd Intelligence Wing related to the release of national security information,” Stefanek said.

Meanwhile, every Air Force unit will conduct a “security-focused stand down” in the next 30 days “to reassess our security posture and procedures, validate the need to know for each person’s access and emphasize to all airmen and [Space Force] guardians the responsibility we are entrusted with to safeguard this information and to enforce and improve our security requirements,” the rep went on.  

The actions come after the FBI arrested Teixeira on April 13 at his mother’s Massachusetts home and charged him with publishing troves of secret and top-secret military documents — including Ukrainian war plans — to Discord, an online messaging platform popular with video gamers and gun enthusiasts.

Though Teixeira had been in the military for less than four years, his job as a cyber transport systems journeyman working on and protecting the infrastructure behind sensitive communication channels required him to have the highest level of security clearance.

The leak — which federal prosecutors say began more than three months before the Pentagon discovered it — has raised questions about how one young, low-ranking individual could have stolen and distributed dozens of highly classified documents without detection and whether the US security clearance system needs revamping.

“The first thing that came to my mind is, ‘Whatever happened to need-to-know?’ That is the principle that is supposed to oversee and restrict access to sensitive classified information,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said during an Appropriations subcommittee hearing.

“Instead, allegedly, the airman 1st class used … the classified internet system to access all sorts of sensitive classified documents that had absolutely nothing to do with his job.”

In response, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said the need-to-know principle “is very much in place,” but acknowledged that the service needs “to enforce it much more rigorously that it appears to have been in this case.”

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) pressed Kendall on the months-long lag between the beginning of the leak and its detection after photos of the documents were posted on Russian-language Telegram channels earlier this month.

Defense experts have told The Post that more prompt recognition of the breach may have prevented the documents from being spread far and wide.

“How could this Guardsman take this information and distribute it electronically for weeks, if not months, and nobody knew about it?” Tester asked Kendall, who could not answer.

“We’re turning on a complete review of our policies themselves within this path to make sure our policies are adequate,” the secretary said, “and that will be illuminated by what we learned about what happened in this incident.”

“There is a full-court press going on about this — we’re all disturbed about it,” he added. “And we’re working very, very hard to get to the bottom of it and take corrective actions.”

Separate investigations by the Pentagon and Air Force will ultimately inform policy changes, which US officials have said may include cutting back sensitive-document access to ensure only those with the proper “need-to-know” clearances can view relevant, sensitive intelligence.