That has left US officials probing what went wrong in the vetting process, wondering why those red flags were either overlooked or deemed insufficiently serious to prevent him from getting a clearance – and whether that was a one-off, or a wider, more systematic problem that needs to be overhauled. Teixeira also applied for a firearm identification card in 20, both of which were denied over concerns by his local police department about the comments he had made at his school that led to his suspension, the prosecutors said. In an application for a firearm identification card in 2020, Teixeira wrote that investigators vetting him for a clearance were aware of the incident, and that he’d given them the relevant “police reports, school letters and any or all documents that were submitted to the investigator that were generated from this event.” “That clearly would have been a red flag,” one Pentagon official told CNN.
Teixeira had to fill out an extensive questionnaire known as E-QIP (Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing) and be vetted by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency before being granted his clearance in 2021, officials told CNN.īut according to court documents filed by prosecutors on Wednesday, Teixeira was suspended from his high school only three years earlier, when a classmate “overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats.”
But that didn’t stop the Pentagon from granting a top-secret security clearance to Jack Teixeira, who prosecutors say had an arsenal of weapons at home and a history of violent online rhetoric. The US government has spent years and vast sums of money overhauling the way it vets and monitors people with access to government secrets. Officials across the government are now scrambling to figure out why.
New details about the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman accused of leaking a trove of classified documents online reveal how multiple red flags went unheeded and weren’t enough to prevent the Pentagon from granting him a top-secret security clearance.
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