Is It Espionage or Is It Treason?

News agencies have been busy reporting about Airman First Class Jack Douglas Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, who is assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing at the Otis Air National Guard Base. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, this military officer took it upon himself to photograph and expose classified materials to an online video game group, which led to the documents being posted more widely on the Internet. Attorney General Merrick Garland said that Teixeira was being detained as part of “an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified national defense information.”

The FBI stated that the arrest of Teixeira “exemplifies our continued commitment to identifying, pursuing, and holding accountable those who betray our country’s trust and put our national security at risk.”

Being on active duty for the 102nd Intelligence Wing, which is charged with “worldwide precision intelligence… for expeditionary combat support and homeland security”, it is reported that Teixeira exposed over a hundred purportedly classified documents. At least five of the documents relating to the Ukraine invasion ended up being shared in Russian channels on the messaging platform Telegram, and at least ten documents concerning the Ukraine war ended up on a Minecraft computer game, with some of these being clearly labeled “Top Secret.”

When asked how someone so young could have had such a high level of security clearance, according to an AP report, Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder stated, “it was the nature of the military to trust its very young service members with high and sometimes grave levels of responsibility, including high levels of security clearance.”

I can understand that Teixeira may have been upset when he learned how the war in Ukraine was being misrepresented to the American people, with Biden continually saying that there were no American troops on the ground, when it fact there were, but Teixeira is in the military. He is not a reporter. In his position he is commissioned to protect our country’s trust and our national security, and his job is not to put at risk the lives of Americans on the ground on foreign soils.

My question is, “Is this espionage or treason?” Treason is the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution. According to Article III, Section 3, Clause 1, the Constitution states:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

In contrast, “espionage” is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “the practice of spying or the use of spies to obtain information about the plans and activities especially of a foreign government”.

Teixeira is in the military. He took a sworn oath to uphold our Constitution and protect our country from enemies, both foreign and domestic. Teixeira knew what he was doing, it was not a mistake, and he “adhered” (gave support) to our enemies by “giving them aid”. He has put American lives at risk. So is this espionage or is this treason?

While we are on the subject, Joe Biden, while senator and vice president, also took sworn oaths to uphold our Constitution, but apparently he was in the habit of stealing classified and Top Secret documents from our government. I use the word “stealing” because it was illegal for him to remove the documents from the secure locations in the Capital where he was allowed to review them. Furthermore, it was illegal to hide these documents in all the vast array of unsecured locations that he had them. Please note that while the president of the United States has the authority to declassify any document, Biden in his offices of senator and vice president did not have the authority to declassify any of this material.

Let’s look at just one of the vast array of places that Biden hid these stolen classified documents. Let’s look at The Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., which is affiliated with the office at the University of Pennsylvania where a “trove of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president” have been discovered. Exposed verified emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop show that Hunter Biden was having discussions about The Penn Biden Center in April of 2016 before the “think tank” opened in 2017. Hunter stated that the plans for The Penn Biden Center included “wealth creation” and that it would “operate like The Clinton Global Initiative without the money raise.” This seems to suggest that the plan was to generate wealth, but to do it somewhat differently from the Clinton Foundation, so there would not be a problem in raising money. Coincidentally I am sure, donations to the University of Pennsylvania “tripled in the two years following the Biden’s Center opening in 2017 with most of the money coming from China.” While Biden rarely comes to the University, he was appointed a professorship and paid a total of $776, 527 in 2017 and 2018, which is double what full-time Penn professors made during the same time.

So what did The Penn Biden Center do that attracted so much money from foreign investors? Maybe that is the wrong question. Concerning Joe’s illegally having stolen classified documents in numerous unsecured locations, maybe the question should be, “Is that espionage or treason?”.

I guess it is true that Joe did not just post the classified documents on the Internet. Just speculating, but if someone was selling access to classified information, keeping boxes in a closet or in a box in your garage would allow you to somewhat better regulate their dissemination, and therefore, you might not have the “money raise” problem that other organizations had who did make things assessable on the Internet.

This leads us to look at someone who illegally had classified and Top Secret documents on an unsecured email server running out of her basement. That person is Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state, who also took a sworn oath of office to uphold the Constitution. Being secretary of state, Hillary did not have the authority to have classified documents outside the secure rooms of the Capital building. When Congress subpoenaed Hillary’s emails from her unsecured home private server, she deleted over 33,000 emails and destroyed equipment. From some group of another 30,000 emails on the server that were reviewed by the FBI, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains were said to contain classified information, eight contained Top Secret information, and 36 contained classified information. In addition, some of the documents in Hillary’s emails were higher in security than Top Secret. They were termed Top Secret/SAP (Special Access Programs). James Comey, former head of the FBI stated that Clinton and her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information”. So Hillary knowingly mishandled highly classified information by placing it on an unsecured home Internet server, where it could easily be hacked by any nation in the world. A good question to ask might be, “Is that espionage or treason?”

So yes, Teixeira messed up and should be charged as such, but when does the FBI arrest Joe and Hillary for being involved in “unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified national defense information” “betraying our country’s trust and put our national security at risk?”