We want to begin with new details in the arrest of a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman in one of the worst breaches of classified intelligence documents in years. Tonight, twenty-one-year-old J.T remains in jail until his next court hearing on Wednesday. He did not enter a plea in a federal courtroom in Boston today, where he was officially charged with unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified or national defense information under the Espionage Act. Well, today, we learned from the charging documents that authorities accused T of knowing exactly what he was doing. He was even searching online to see if authorities were on to him as the leaker. T started to posting what appeared to be classified documents in an online gaming chat platform as early as December.

Court documents allege the twenty-one-year-old, gamer and International Air Guardsman actually searched his own government computer for the word leak, apparently concerned investigators may have identified the source. As the charges were read in a Boston courtroom, twenty-one-year-old J.T stood silently. Arrested Thursday by heavily armed federal agents outside his mother’s Massachusetts home. T now charged under the Espionage Act. Federal investigators accused him of posting dozens of images bearing top secret markings to Discord, an online gaming platform. According to the criminal complaint, T did cyber defense operations in the Air National Guard and required a top-secret security clearance that gave him access to some of the government’s most highly classified records known as SCI. Former Secretary of Defense M.E said internal criminal security system failed. Three days before T’s arrest, court records detailed how federal investigators questioned a user of that gaming platform. Among the first record posted, an intelligence status report about the war in Ukraine. Billing information revealed the username behind the post was the defendant who used his home address.