BOSTON —
Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified military documents online, pleaded guilty Monday in federal court.

Teixeira, 22, of North Dighton, who was arrested in April, admitted to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information and agreed to accept a prison sentence between 11 and 16-plus years. As part of the deal, prosecutors agreed not to charge him with additional counts under the Espionage Act.

"This guilty plea brings accountability and it brings a measure of closure to a chapter that created profound harms to our nation's security," said Matt Olsen, U.S. Assistant Attorney General for National Security.

Authorities said Teixeira, who enlisted in the Air National Guard in 2019, began sharing military secrets with other Discord users around January — first by typing out classified documents and then sharing photographs of files that bore "SECRET" and "TOP SECRET" markings. Teixeira worked as a “cyber transport systems specialist,” essentially an IT specialist responsible for military communications networks.

"As a result of Mr. Teixiera's actions our nation's adversaries, all of our adversaries, were given access to sensitive national defense information," said Olsen. "Such unlawful disclosure damages our intelligence capabilities, compromises our sources and methods and it blinds us to threats from hostile nations and terrorist groups. It strains our relationships with our partners and allies who have entrusted us with their secrets to advance our common interests of global security and peace. Most starkly of all, it risked the lives of the men and women in uniform and those in the intelligence community who work every day to defend the nation."

He had previously pleaded not guilty to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. Each count is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

In recent weeks, members of the House and Senate Committees of Veterans' Affairs have been in intense negotiations hammering out a compromise between three bills that could endanger the nation's veteran-centric health care system -- the Veterans Health Administration, or VHA. The competing bills were introduced by Sens. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa.

If the language in those bills isn't radically changed in the eventual compromise, harms produced by a decade of outsourcing of veterans' health care will only be exacerbated.

Since 2015, $150 billion has been channeled to private-sector providers. Should more patients and taxpayer dollars be diverted into the private sector, the VHA will cease to be able to effectively serve its 9 million enrolled veterans. It could also jeopardize the role the VHA plays as one of the nation's leading research powerhouses, in teaching the majority of the nation's health care professional workforce, and responding to national emergencies.

As one clinical leader at a VHA medical center, who was granted anonymity in order to avoid retaliation for speaking without permission, predicted, "If sending patients to the private sector isn't reversed and soon, in five years the VHA will no longer be a provider but only an insurance payer. The unique model of comprehensive care we provide veterans and the services we give to the nation will disappear."

The root of the current problem stems from the passages of the Choice Act in 2014 and the VA Mission Act in 2018, which created the private-sector Veterans Community Care Program, or VCCP. The formation of the VCCP could have led to a modest use of the private health care sector to supplement the VHA when veterans were unable to get care in a timely fashion. But, determined to privatize the VHA, the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs under then-President Donald Trump, Robert Wilkie, opened eligibility, ensuring that millions of veterans would be outsourced.

Since the program began, studies have documented that wait times for non-VA appointments are longer, on average, than those at the VHA, while quality is lower (sometimes dangerously so).

Nonetheless, Congress has allowed VCCP usage to metastasize, growing by an astonishing 17% a year, with costs quadrupling since 2014. VCCP expenses now consume one-third of the VHA's clinical care budget. To cover those outlays, VHA leaders have just announced a massive slowing of hiring, even though hundreds of thousands of new veterans who suffered service-related toxic exposures are entering the system.

A compromise bill could make things far worse. Particularly problematic would be a provision that allows veterans to schedule appointments for vision or hearing services without VHA authorization. Allowing veterans to bypass the VHA for a few services inevitably opens the door to self-referral for countless others. That was the position advocated by organizations who recently told Congress that veterans should likewise be able to make appointments in the private sector for mental health, substance use, skin, feet, diabetes and prosthetics care, and just send the bill to the VHA.

In a report to Congress in 2022, VA Secretary Denis McDonough warned that this kind of relentless outsourcing of veteran care to the private sector could create a "'spiral effect' in some areas, where workload and talent are shifting externally and thus threaten to harm VA."

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.