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U.S. Official: Suspect Arrested In Pentagon Leak; Soon, AG Merrick Garland To Speak; Attorney General Merrick Garland Gives Update On Pentagon Leaks Arrest. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired April 13, 2023 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[14:30:00]

ERICA HILL, CNN HOST: Evan, thank you. Stay with us.

Also joining us, CNN security correspondent, Josh Campbell.

Josh, as we look at the way all of this is unfolding -- and for the folks that are just joining us, you're looking at these pictures from our affiliates there from just moments ago of Jack Teixeira.

We believe this is the family home in Dighton, Massachusetts, which is in the southern part of the state, just a little bit south of Dighton, Mass.

And one of the things that stood out, so we just heard in this Pentagon briefing, there are specific questions about whether certain platforms like Discord are being monitored. How long were these documents out there?

And what we heard twice was that part of what DOD does, they're really monitoring more on an international level, not as much domestically, Josh.

So when we look at what is or is not out there, what is your sense of who is monitoring potential activity on these sites that could include sensitive intelligence documents? Do we know?

JOSH CAMPBELL, CNN SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: I can tell you, after every major spy case that we've seen arrests in U.S. history, going back to Aldridge Ames in '94, Robert Hanssen, who was an FBI agent, in 2001, after Chelsea Manning, after Reality Winter, after all of these espionage cases, the government does an after-action and tries to determine what were the vulnerabilities. How was this information compromised?

And although, you know, this arrest is going down right now, we believe that that is the suspect there on your screen, you know, the spy hunters are obviously celebrating that this person has now been taken into custody.

They are preparing themselves for the accusations, the ridicule, the criticism that's to come. And that is, how could this information have been compromised because compromised?

And it gets exactly what you were just saying there as far as the systems, what monitoring is being done, what trip wires are out there?

And so again, you know, the good news for the spy hunters is that this person is now in custody. But they have a lot of work to do to determine what the best practices may have been violated, what new best practices may need to be implemented.

As we look at this video, I do want to point out one thing. You know, those watching may be wondering, well, why this overwhelming show of force here, where you have FBI tactical agents who are now taking someone into custody who isn't accused of a violent act. This person accused of disclosing information improperly.

FBI agents, as they prepare their arrest plan, they will work to determine, gather every piece of intelligence that they can as they assess, is this a dangerous person?

We know from that stunning "Washington Post" report recently that the individual who led this group on this platform, who we believe to be this air guardsmen who has now been taken into custody, had talked about being a gun enthusiast, had been at gun ranges. He's obviously a member of the military.

And so the FBI is factoring that into their determination about what type of force you bring to this residence in order to take this this person into custody.

As we saw at the beginning of the video, this arrest obviously taking place outside. And this is very much textbook. The FBI operators there want to control the situation. They don't want to rush up to the house and rush up to the suspect.

What you saw on that video is the FBI agents commanding that officer -- that suspect right there, calling him back to the vehicle.

You can see the agents there safely tucked behind that up-armored Bear Cat. They're bringing the suspect to them. They have control of the situation.

You see that his head -- his hands are on top of his head. That obviously so he doesn't try to reach for a weapon. They need to ensure that he's secured. And so we're seeing that very textbook.

They have the indication that this person may own a gun, may be a gun enthusiast. They don't want to take any chances.

And then we move to the next step. You know, that -- that home now is a crime scene. As we've seen in all of these major spy cases in previous history, the feds will be there for a long time.

Because, of course, they need to determine, are there additional classified documents that are inside that residence?

What we've seen in past cases, the feds will get their search warrants lined up ahead of time in order to go in and search that top to bottom, essentially anywhere that a document could be disclosed, any social media, you know, that this person may have been in, on any computer device, any type of phone.

Anywhere where a digital file could be that could pose a risk to disclosing information from the federal government will be searched.

And so we'll have to wait and see what happens next. Obviously, authorities will be looking to determine whether other co- conspirators, you know, other people who might have access as well.

But at least the first step in bringing this to some type of resolution is now -- now appears to be happening. And that is the arrest of this person.

But, of course, the investigation there's still so much left to be done.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, CNN HOST: And a reminder that Teixeira, the suspect that you see on the screen now, is 21 year -- 21-years-old, employed by the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

And I want to bring our panel back.

Josh, stay with us.

Evan, stay with us as well.

I want to bring back in Kim Dozier, Dave Priess, and Colonel Cedric Leighton.

And, David, let me get back to you because it really stood out to me to hear the brigadier general basically compare this to a home where the owner locked the door -- the owner, I would say, in this case, he was comparing to the U.S. government -- locking the door and then a burglar somehow got in.

[14:35:07]

So he's suggesting that everyone signs a nondisclosure agreement and that they did their part. And this is the reason this man broke his contract with the U.S. government.

I mean, is that something that that you buy as justification or guess an explanation for this being allowed to happen, with all due respect to somebody's property at home, that may be priceless for them, but national security being compared to that?

DAVID PRIESS, FORMER CIA INTELLIGENCE OFFICER: It's an interesting analogy. And you note that, if you listen, he had to modify it in real time. When he referred back to it a second time, he said, oh, it's not that they're breaking in. He mentioned that you lent the keys to this person.

That's a little bit closer. It's not that this information was hacked from somebody on the outside, which in first analogy would lead you to believe. This is somebody that the United States government, with the proper background checks and all of the procedures that he kept referring to, allowed this person to have access to this information.

And, of course, he's not the only one. It's been estimated that there is close to three million people with security clearances in the United States, with over a million of those having access to top- secret information.

And the idea is you give people the keys to the rooms in the house where they need to access that information.

There are going to be legitimate questions about, well, how many keys did this individual have? How many rooms was he allowed to go into to take things out of as part of his job? And did he really need that as part of his job?

The analogy gets much more complicated. But those are the kinds of questions that investigators will be looking at.

HILL: You know, it's interesting, too, as we were talking about the fallout earlier this week, Ukrainian officials -- I was struck by the fact that Ukrainian officials initially said they weren't overly concerned.

Because they've been pretty careful about what they're putting out there, citing concerns about Washington's ability to actually keep these secrets safe.

And, Kim, I find that interesting, too, in the context of what we heard from the president just a short time ago this afternoon, essentially downplaying this, saying it wasn't contemporaneous information, that he was concerned --not concerned about the leak, but is concerned that it happened.

How damaging is all of this overall? How damaging have these past few days been?

KIMBERLY DOZIER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Every single U.S. ally will right now be looking at, what did we share with the U.S., and might it be exposed by this leak?

And one of the things that investigators will be looking at is which networks in the Pentagon system did this young military intelligence technician have access to?

There are different places like the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. It's one of the ways to network that the Pentagon uses. Teixeira amongst itself.

But also remember, after the attacks of 9/11, one of the things that the 9/11 Commission concluded was that a lack of intelligence sharing lead to not the right people knowing about this imminent attack.

So the momentum went in the other way, put it on these worldwide networks that are shared amongst the State Department, the Pentagon, other intelligence services.

So that say, you're chasing a terrorist suspect, you can almost Google this data and see what everybody else has on the same person.

Now then the question becomes, when you have things like the Chelsea Manning leak and now this one, how much access do we allow? Which technician? At what level?

It seems like this guy had too much. One of the reasons I think that they were really careful with the arrest is, as Josh was talking about, that they were very deliberate about this, is they didn't know how much this person had pulled down off of the systems, and perhaps were fearing that they do a massive dump because they knew that they were about to be jailed.

GOLODRYGA: Colonel, according to "The New York Times -- excuse me - "The Washington Post" reporting, this suspect apparently had a dark view of the U.S. government.

He viewed it as a sinister force that's out to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. And he ranted about, quote, "government overreach."

I'm just curious, how worrisome is that to you, knowing that this isn't just some average citizen? This is somebody with top intelligence clearance, it seems to be, and somebody who's working as a National Guardsmen.

COL. CEDRIC LEIGHTON, CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Yes, you know, it's clearly, Bianna, very concerning. And one of the key things to think about here is that -- you know, is -- you know, as we were talking about earlier, we had this paradigm shift from need to know to need to share in the intelligence world.

And one of the other problems that is part of this is that the missions of Air National Guard units have actually expanded in recent years, giving them a global mission, a global mission that is, in ways, connected to the intelligence community.

[14:40:03]

So they're going to have access to intelligence systems like JWICs (ph) and the other systems that are used to communicate on the intelligence community and within the military's intelligence organizations.

So it is very concerning that somebody who, you know, takes a very dark view of the U.S. government has a -- in essence, had access to this and doesn't really understand the kind of role that the government is playing here in gathering it's -- the information on foreign adversaries and others that are legitimate intelligence targets.

So this becomes a -- you know, a very critical element where we have to put together not only the training aspect for the individual airmen, but also how much this person has actually seen. And you know what kind of internal threat people like him, opposed to

not only the intelligence structure but his home unit, as well as the U.S. government itself.

HILL: You know, Josh, we heard our colleague, Oren Liebermann, asking about any measures to restrict access within this unit, the 102nd Intel Unit there for the Massachusetts Air National Guard. We didn't get a full answer on that.

But it does raise the question, Josh, we talk, when we look at even the intel community, how are members of the intel community -- and we should remind our viewers, of course, you spent time in the FBI -- how are they monitored?

CAMPBELL: Well, after these major disclosures that we've seen, the most high-profile disclosures over the last three decades, I would say, the intelligence community learns lessons.

For example, after Robert Hanssen was arrested inside the FBI, officials learned that not only was he able to print out documents and carry them out the front door of FBI headquarters.

But he also had free-range access to both the FBI's classified network as well as the State Department's classified network. And he could sit in his office all day with the door closed and browse and troll for secrets.

We've seen a shift since that time for instituting what's called UAM, User Access Monitoring.

And it's essentially the U.S. government, the security divisions in each of the respective intelligence agencies monitoring their own people.

Looking at their keystrokes, looking at what they're searching for, looking down to even what they're clicking "print" on, what they're, you know, downloading and taking out of that machine.

And in fact, whenever you log into a classified system in the u s government, you actually get a banner that pops up that says you are being monitored, you, as an employee, access and classified information, you have no expectation of privacy.

And so we've seen those kinds of standards being put into place.

But for example, after Chelsea Manning, who, of course, was the Army private who was arrested in Iraq associated with the WikiLeaks disclosures, there was this question about removable media and using thumb drives to put into the system.

We know on her computers, at least, according to an Army forensic examiner, who testified in her case, that they found hundreds of thousands of documents, the source code on her computer.

And of course, there was a question about, how can someone just so easily put a thumb drive in and then cart away all of these documents? And so they continue to lock down the systems over time after they learn from each new vulnerability. We'll have to wait and see exactly here how this suspect actually got access to these top-secrets -- this top-secret information.

There -- officials are alluding to it. We know, based on CNN's reporting, and as the Pentagon spokesman said a short time ago, there's this issue of distribution lists.

So every morning, for those who are working in intelligence, you get intelligence reports.

Based on the type of cases that you work, based on the type of topics that you cover, you'll get information from the NSA, from CIA. Not -- not source information, not raw information, but you'll get the finished reports.

Which, you know, if you are intent on carting away secrets, that and of itself, even though it's not the sources and methods, could prove damaging.

And so we'll have to wait and see what this person's role was, what their job was, how they actually got access.

I will say that, you know, I've worked -- you know, I was in the FBI working overseas alongside U.S. military personnel, intelligence analysts, some of them very young. They were extremely professional.

So I don't think we'll read too much into the age of this person. Because I can tell you firsthand that there are young people in the military that do incredible work in the intelligence field around the world.

The question here will be, what was the profile of this person and were there any warning signs?

Every year, you know, military officials, intelligence officials, you get trained on the info sec training, which most -- most people loathe having to go through that training every single year.

But it actually teaches you how to safeguard information. But also how to be on -- on the lookout for insider threats, you know, attributes in your colleagues that might be concerning.

We'll have to wait and see from officials whether this person exhibited some of those characteristics. And of course, if that's the case, why they weren't picked up on.

The last thing I'll say is, well -- and this especially specifically comes down to the military. You know, there's long been criticism of the military compared to other U.S. intelligence agencies about its use of the polygraph in order to gain access to top-secret information.

For example, in CIA and the FBI, all employees, on condition of their employment, are polygraphed. And then they're reinvestigated periodically. They have five-year re-investigations where, you know, that you have to go through a polygraph, you know, over time. I've done it myself multiple times.

[13:45:09]

And the question they ask you in each of those investigations, one of the questions is, have you disclosed information to someone without a need to know?

The problem here, in the Pentagon, you know, the Defense Department, which comprises the bulk, the largest number of personnel in the U.S. intelligence community, it's not uniform.

You can get access to top-secret information without ever having been polygraphed or going through that re-investigation. Of course, the polygraph itself is often controversial. Some say that it's -- you know, it's not actual science. Obviously, it doesn't hold up in court.

But we know that to top security officials, it certainly does serve as a deterrent if you know that in a year, in three years, in four years that you're going to be on the box, as they say, and at being asked the question, did you disclose classified information, that could actually dictate your behavior.

But again, we don't know specifically what this person -- what their clearance was, you know, what parameter were in place, whether they're polygraphed.

But I bring that up because that's something we've heard time and time again. And as Congress and inspectors general and oversight officials look back on this case, we certainly expect they will be uncovering some lessons learned.

And I think these security issues will probably be among those.

GOLODRYGA: Really helpful information, Josh.

For those who are just joining us, the breaking news is that an arrest has been made, the suspect behind the massive security leak of classified documents.

We are expecting to hear from Attorney General Merrick Garland at any moment.

Right now, you're looking at images of this 21-year-old suspect, Jack Teixeira. He is an employee of the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

We will slip in a quick break and come right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:50:34]

HILL: Welcome back. If you are just joining us here on CNN, we're following the breaking news out of North Dighton, Massachusetts, where, as you can see in the pictures on your screen, just moments ago, an arrest was made.

This is of the person who is suspected of leaking those documents, these highly sensitive intelligence documents online.

Jack Teixeira is 21, an Air National Guardsman, someone who both "The New York Times" and "The Washington Post" had identified earlier as a leader of an online chat group where these leaked documents first appeared.

We want to bring back in our panel.

And if you're just joining us, too, in terms of what we know at this hour, we're waiting to hear from the attorney general.

We did hear from the Pentagon in a briefing, not a lot of details, as you can imagine.

The Pentagon saying that they are reducing access in terms of who has access to the classified materials. But being very clear that they consider this a deliberate criminal act.

One thing that has come up is the age and people trying to put together I guess a better idea of who this person may be who had leaked the documents before we had names.

We're getting some details from this reporting from "The Washington Post" overnight.

And David Priess, I want to bring you back in here.

Based on your time in the CIA, we look at what we know in terms of this reporting that this is a 21-year-old man, he's described as a gun enthusiast.

Feels like, in some of these descriptions, somebody who's hungry for power, that he would get angry if the people in his chat group weren't paying enough attention to some of the information that he was posted.

What type of a profile does that start to paint for you, David?

PRIESS: Yes, I would like to caution people against getting sucked into a couple of vortexes that are really easy, right now.

One of them is to say, well, he was 21. He was clearly too young to have access to that kind of information.

If so, then we have a real problem in national security because there are a whole lot more 21-year-olds in the U.S. military and the national security enterprise than there are people who are older than 50 or 60-years-old.

Age does not correlate with criminal activity and willingness to sell out one's country by handing over classified information.

The other one is a concern that, you know, we need to be watching.

HILL: Sorry, David, we're going to interrupt you briefly.

We're going to go back to the Attorney General Merrick Garland, who was speaking on this topic.

MERRICK GARLAND, ATTORNEY GENERAL: Today, the Justice Department arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira in connection with an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information.

Teixeira is an employee of the United States Air Force National Guard. FBI agents took Teixeira into custody earlier this afternoon without incident.

He will have an initial appearance at the U.S. district court for the District of Massachusetts.

I want to thank the FBI, Justice Department prosecutors and our colleagues at the Department of Defense for their diligent work on this case.

This investigation is ongoing. We will share more information at the appropriate time.

Thanks, everyone.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Did he have lawful access to these documents?

GOLODRYGA: Relatively short statement there from the attorney general. Once again confirming what we have been reporting, and that is the arrest of 21-year-old Jack Teixeira.

He is an employee of the 102nd Intelligence Wing, the Massachusetts Air Force National Guard. He will appear before a court there first in Massachusetts.

And again, no questions were asked. He left after that statement.

I want to go back to our panel.

And I'm sorry that we keep interrupting you, David, but obviously, this is a breaking news development.

If you can go back to the point you were making earlier?

PRIESS: Yes, we're starting to get some reporting about the potential motivations here. And we're hearing things like that this suspect was heavy into gun culture. He may have had some views against the U.S. government. There were racist and misogynist things being said on this server.

And those are potential motivations. But when you look at the motivations for someone to spy or to do things like release classified documents, they almost always fall into one or more of four categories.

And the acronym MICE actually helps you remember it. "M" is for money. They're selling the secrets to get money. "I" is for ideology. They have some kind of anti-government ideology. And that may be the case here. "C" is compromised or coercion. And "E" is ego.

[14:55:58]

Now, in this case, the reporting we've seen so far really points to the latter of those, that this person appeared to want to impress these men and boys on this private server and was upset when they weren't as excited about seeing the classified information as he thought.

That's not the kind of motivation we often see in these investigations. But focusing on that is what the investigators are really going to be doing now to figure out what drove this person to use his privileged access to

actually release this classified information into the wild.

HILL: Evan, you first brought us the news of this arrest. We started to hear rumblings. Give us a sense. How quickly was all of this unfolding?

PEREZ: Well, I think everything kind of took a turn once the FBI realized that the media was about to identify Teixeira, which was just a few hours ago.

Certainly this morning, we knew that they had a very good idea of the -- of the suspect. They were doing some of the background work.

Before they can execute a search of the home there, they do a lot of work to try to make sure they understand what they're getting into. They try to try to figure out who? Maybe there. They want to make sure they get the -- obviously to get a judge's permission for all of this.

So some of that was happening earlier. And then -- and you know, all of their plans really accelerated once the media made public the name of the suspect, and that happened just -- just a couple of hours ago, of course.

We knew that the FBI had made a lot of progress just over the last few days. You know, we knew that there were thousands of people who had access to some of these documents that were being made public that we now seen publicly.

But you know, they married -- managed to narrow it down pretty quickly over -- over the course of days. They spent the weekend doing interviews with people who are associated with this group that was online on Discord. And so they narrowed -- they homed in on Teixeira very, very quickly.

And by today, they knew that he was the person that they were going to try to go for. It was just a matter of time.

And so everything kind of accelerated in the last couple of hours because of his identity being -- being made public.

What we expect now, Bianna and Erica, is we expect that he's going to be processed there in in Boston. If he wants to make any statements, obviously, they will take those. But most likely, you know, he has he'll have an attorney now representing him.

And then they will try to -- they will start the procedure of removing him to bring him back to the Washington, D.C., area, where we expect that the charges are going to be filed.

Probably in the Northern District of Virginia, which is where the department, the Pentagon is located, which is the jurisdiction, obviously, that owns the documents.

So that's the reason why we're expecting him to eventually be facing those charges that the attorney general just briefly announced, which is the dissemination, the retention, illegal access and dissemination of national security information, classified national -- national security information.

You know, to the point that you guys have been making, I think -- he's 21-years-old. And as I think the Pentagon briefer was saying, you know, you've got so many people of that age group who are trusted with a lot of, you know, million-dollar equipment in the in the U.S. military. They're trusted with everything.

So this guy is not emblematic certainly of the average 21-year-old who is trusted with this kind of information.

But one thing that has emerged in this investigation is that the Pentagon has a lot of work to do to button up, you know, who has access, and how it tracks these people who are trusted with this information.

It's something that you're going to emerge -- it's going to emerge over the next few days.

GOLODRYGA: That is true. And I think, you know, for most of our viewers at home -- I know I speak for Erica and myself, we were talking offline about this. It's just the fact that we keep referencing his age. Not necessarily because of any intentions that he may or may not have in terms of financial gain.

But just the fact that it's surprising I think too many people, unlike those in the know, like Evan and Josh, and our guests here, that so many young people have access and are privy to such classified information.

Josh, one final question to you. What type of sentence usually goes along with some of the charges he may be facing?

CAMPBELL: I'm glad you brought that up because it actually impacts how this arrest went down as well. We'll have to wait and see what the actual charges are.

I mean, quite frankly, you know, under the Espionage Act, if they throw the book at him, he could -- he's looking at serious, significant time. One thing we've seen in some cases is, depending on, you know, if he

has a good lawyer that's able to perhaps do a plea, the government is interested often in two things.

And that is, first, what is the extent of the damage here? They still have a damage assessment to be done.

[14:59:47]

And so we've seen, in past espionage cases, where, in exchange for laying everything out, telling us everything, where is all the information, how did this happen, walk us through exactly what happened, that can lead to, you know, I won't say light sentences, but that's a consideration the Justice Department could make if he cooperates.

But the second thing is, you know, you have to understand you have a suspect now who will go through the judicial system and be prosecuted, if he doesn't plea.