#make no mistake - he was a white nationalist qanon conspiracy gun nut

[odinsblog]

In the eight months since his arrest, federal law enforcement investigators and top intelligence officials, as well as Teixeira’s online friends, have struggled to understand what may have driven him to carry out one of the biggest classified intelligence disclosures in years. Nothing about Teixeira fit the profile of the traditional leaker. He wasn’t trying to expose official misdeeds. He wasn’t a principled whistleblower. Why would he give classified documents to a bunch of teenagers?


Documents and interviews by The Post in partnership with “Frontline” with more than four dozen people, including those who knew Teixeira online and in real life, as well as national security officials and experts, offer the most detailed account yet of his motivations, how he allegedly obtained so many national security secrets and how he was caught.

The answers are alarming and at times bewildering. They expose how vulnerable the Pentagon is to a threat from within and the vast proliferation of top-secret information across the government. Teixeira used his privileged access to read intelligence documents and reports that had nothing to do with his assigned duties. His superiors caught him in the act several times but did not remove him from his job.

His online world was a hothouse of racist and violent rhetoric, suffused with conspiracy theories. He sought out classified information to validate his baseless suspicions that federal law enforcement was complicit in mass violence as part of a plot to subdue and control the [white] citizenry.

Intelligence officials said the trove Teixeira is accused of revealing was extraordinarily damaging, full of details about the course of the Russia-Ukraine war, including troop casualty numbers that neither Moscow nor Kyiv had publicly shared. They discussed Ukrainian planning for sabotage operations and demonstrated that the United States was monitoring the communications of the Russian military, as well as Ukrainian generals and political leaders.

…Teixeira had warned the boys that federal authorities were “nefarious,” Charles said, capable of fiendish abuses. He claimed without evidence that “the feds” knew in advance of the racist May 2022 mass killing in Buffalo, among other massacres, and let them happen to create a pretext for tightening gun-control laws, Charles said.

…In March 2018, his sophomore year, a group of students reported Teixeira to the administration after they heard him “talking about Molotov cocktails and guns,” according to a copy of a Dighton police report that The Post and “Frontline” obtained following an official records request. Teixeira allegedly told one student, “I’ve got a moly [molotov cocktail] in my bag!” and asked, “What would you do if I threw one down the hall?” Another student said Teixeira made a similar statement to him about throwing the explosive at school.


Two teachers who had been trained on how to respond to a school shooter, and to spot warning signs of violence in their students, also expressed concerns about Teixeira “because of how much he talks about guns,” according to the police report.


A month earlier, Teixeira had shown classmates at a lunch table a video of someone apparently killed in battle in the Middle East. “Look at this!” Teixeira said “with a smile, almost as if he was excited,” the police report said.


Dighton police also took statements from several students who said Teixeira had made violent threats against Black people. They told investigators that Teixeira said, “I want to kill all Black people,” “Black people don’t exist,” and “I hate n-----s,” according to the police report. One student said Teixeira used the phrase “I want to kill all Black people” in his automotive class “a lot.”


One female student who reported Teixeira to administrators told police that he “makes racist comments and is always talking about guns or war and that she had also heard about him killing animals,” according to the report. The student also noted that Teixeira was attempting to obtain a firearms identification card “and that someone should know about it.” In the state of Massachusetts, the card permits the possession of “non-large-capacity rifles, shotguns, and ammunition.”

(continue reading)