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Pentagon “Geeky Leaks” suspect Jack Teixeira said online he wanted to murder a “ton of people” in the name of “culling the weak minded” and talked about rigging an “assassination van,” federal prosecutors alleged.
The new revelations about the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman appeared in a court filing ahead of a Thursday pre-trial detention hearing, in which prosecutors argued Teixeira should be kept behind bars not only to guard against more document leaks – but potentially to prevent him from inflicting violence on the public.
Magistrate Judge David Hennessy said following Thursday’s hearing he would rule on prosecutors’ request at a later date.
“The defendant undoubtedly poses a danger to the US at large based on his ability to cause exceptionally grave danger to the US national security,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in the motion. “However, there is also evidence to suggest that the defendant may also pose a physical danger to the community.”
In February of this year, Texeira told a fellow Discord user that he “was tempted to make a specific type of minivan into an ‘assassination van,’” and sought advice from another “about what type of rifle would be easy to operate from the back of an SUV,” according to court documents.
“He describes how he would conduct the shooting in a ‘crowded urban or suburban environment,’” prosecutors wrote, adding that last month, “the defendant described SUVs and crossovers as ‘mobile gun trucks’ and ‘[o]ff-road and good assassination vehicles.’”
Most alarmingly, the document says, Teixeira wrote on social media in November of last year that “if he had his way, he would ‘kill a [expletive] ton of people’ because it would be ‘culling the weak minded.’
Throughout this period, Teixeira is suspected of publishing sensitive classified documents to a Discord social network server he ran from home to show off to his online gamer buddies. Some of the documents later made their way into enemy hands, with Russians suspected of tampering with several of the Ukraine War-related papers he’d posted.
