Before Jack Teixeira joined the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Air National Guard in Massachusetts — and allegedly leaked classified intelligence for over a year prior to his arrest in April — he faced an investigation from the Department of Defense.

That investigation, part of the standardized government process for determining whether a person should be granted security clearance, is designed to evaluate the risk applicants pose to United States national security. As part of the process, investigators would be expected to interview Teixeira’s friends and associates, in order to examine his conduct in real life.

But Teixeira had concerns that investigators would uncover aspects of his more hidden, online life, a young woman who dated him recalls in The Discord Leaks, a documentary from FRONTLINE and The Washington Post.

“He was a little bit worried they were going to, in their interview, bring up, ‘Hey, we found this Discord account,’” the young woman, who asked to be referred to by her online name Crow to protect her identity, says in the above excerpt.

As The Discord Leaks reports, Teixeira spent much of his online life on Discord, which started in 2015 as a communication tool for gamers and now attracts 150 million monthly active users who share content and memes, and communicate in mostly private groups called servers.

Teixeira was concerned that the content shared among his Discord friends would raise red flags to investigators, recalls Crow, who says she had an online relationship with Teixeira for about a year.

“There was a lot of racist talk on that server. There was a lot of talk of killing ATF agents, killing different government officials, committing acts of terrorism,” says Crow, who once became a neo-Nazi through people she met online and now says she no longer has anything to do with the movement. Crow describes content on the Discord server as “things that are probably not great for someone in the military to be saying.”

But as The Discord Leaks goes on to explore, the questionnaire Teixeira was required to complete did not ask him to disclose which social media platforms he used, his usernames on Discord or the servers he was a member of — which meant investigators had a potential blind spot to Teixeira’s conduct online.

Through extensive interviews with people who knew Teixeira online and analysis of digital evidence he left behind, FRONTLINE and The Washington Post piece together a portrait of Teixeira’s persona across multiple Discord servers. As members of his Discord circle recall in the documentary, they exchanged gory content featuring beheadings and police shootings and openly used racial slurs, antisemitic language and white supremacist iconography on the platform.

As the security clearance investigation continued, according to Crow, Teixeira became less active on the platform. The investigation was completed in 2021, and he was ultimately approved for security clearance by the Department of Defense.

After starting his position in the Air National Guard, Teixeira allegedly leaked classified material on Discord beginning as early as February 2022, according to The Washington Post’s reporting. Crow says that she left a server they were both on before he allegedly leaked documents there.

In the above excerpt from the documentary, The Post’s Shane Harris notes that one of the big questions the journalists tried to answer was how Teixeira got security clearance despite his behavior. The documentary explores other incidents from Teixeira’s background, including a police report that revealed Teixeira was reported by students during his sophomore year of high school for saying he had a Molotov cocktail in his bag. The same report cited witness statements saying he made violent threats against Black people.

The Department of Defense declined to give an interview to FRONTLINE and The Washington Post or answer questions about Jack Teixeira. Following a 45-day review prompted by 21-year-old Teixeira’s arrest in April, the Pentagon said there wasn’t a “single point of failure” in the leaks and wrote that the majority of personnel with clearances are trustworthy, but improvements were needed to the security clearance process and how classified information is safeguarded.

In the excerpt, Harris asks Lt. Gen. Scott Rice, director of the Air National Guard from 2016 until his retirement in 2020, if the security clearance system should have caught the potential red flags. “The military vetting system is pretty robust and it catches a lot of stuff,” Rice says. But he acknowledges “it’s not perfect and some things come through.”

For the full story of Jack Teixeira’s alleged leak of national security secrets, why he wasn’t stopped sooner and the role of platforms like Discord, watch The Discord Leaks. The documentary, directed by Thomas Jennings and Annie Wong and produced by Jennings and Wong and The Post’s Shane Harris and Samuel Oakford, raises tough questions about how the military’s vetting process addresses applicants’ internet activity, online radicalization, and how Discord polices hate speech on its platform.

Teixeira has pleaded not guilty, and remains incarcerated pending his trial.

The Discord Leaks premieres Tuesday, Dec. 12, and will be available to watch in full at pbs.org/frontline, washingtonpost.com and in the PBS App starting at 7/6c. It will premiere on PBS stations (check local listings) and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel at 10/9c.

The Discord Leaks is a FRONTLINE production with 2over10 Media in association with The Washington Post. The producers and directors are Thomas Jennings and Annie Wong. The writer is Thomas Jennings. The Washington Post reporters are Shane Harris, Samuel Oakford and Chris Dehghanpoor. The senior producers are Dan Edge and Frank Koughan. The executive editor of The Washington Post is Sally Buzbee. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.

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