New York set to ban gas furnaces, stoves in new buildings

ALBANY, N.Y. — New York will require new buildings to be zero-emissions starting in 2026 and make a state authority a major player in developing renewables as part of this year's budget, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced late Thursday.

The state’s budget will ban fossil fuel combustion in most new buildings under seven stories starting in 2026, with larger buildings covered in 2029. That means no propane heating and no gas furnaces or stoves in most new construction.

New York would be the first state to take this step through legislative action; California and Washington have done so through building codes.

“We’re going to be the first state in the nation to advance zero-emissions new homes and buildings,” Hochul said Thursday, announcing a conceptual deal on the budget that was due March 31.

The measure will help the state achieve its ambitious mandate to slash emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2030 and 85 percent by 2050 and was recommended in a plan approved in December by state agency heads and outside experts. Exemptions will be included for commercial kitchens, emergency generators and hospitals.

But some key details have not yet been finalized. Hochul also indicated she expects the deal to include rebates to consumers as part of a cap-and-trade initiative for emissions, but a detailed agreement hasn’t been reached on that issue.

There is no measure that eventually bans the replacement of gas furnaces in existing homes included in the budget, which Hochul had proposed and is recommended in the state’s climate plan. Lawmakers rejected that early on in negotiations. And none of the budget proposals included any measure targeting gas stoves in existing buildings.

Details of the agreement will be laid out in state budget bills that have not yet been printed. A potentially major caveat on grid reliability pushed by Assembly Democrats and a major gas utility also hasn’t been finalized, leading environmental advocates to moderate their enthusiasm until they see the final wording.

The Assembly initially proposed a requirement for the state’s Public Service Commission to review the ability of the electric system to support new buildings, although it was not clear how that would function because the requirements for reliable service already enshrined in state law.

“As the governor and legislative leadership continue to hammer out the details, they need to ensure that this is as strong as possible and there aren't any loopholes,” said Liz Moran, New York policy advocate for Earthjustice. “The technology is ready, and we absolutely have to be doing this to meet our climate law mandates.”

Advocates had pushed for an earlier implementation of the restrictions and pushed back on a later start for commercial buildings. Hochul had initially proposed a split at four stories for the timeline, but environmental groups and Senate Democrats backed seven stories to align with New York City’s zero-emission building law that passed in 2021.

The later date — starting Dec. 31, 2028 — is also expected to apply for commercial buildings and those over 100,000 square feet, Hochul spokesperson Katy Zielinski said.

A measure to end the “100 foot rule” subsidies for new gas hookups, as proposed by Senate Democrats, is not in the budget, Zielinski said. That means utilities will still pass on some costs of hooking up new customers, who they are legally required to serve, to other gas ratepayers.

The state budget will include a provision to allow for rebates to New York residents under a cap-and-trade program that is expected to be rolled out in 2025 and will raise gas prices at the pump and home heating fuel costs. Some additional details about how the funds could be spent may also be included but details are not finalized, according to the governor’s office.

“What we're doing is setting up a mechanism to be able to allow for rebates that we generate with a cap and invest program,” Hochul said. “We think that is the important first step, because we couldn't do it under existing law.”

Some environmental advocates had pressed for the Legislature to play more of a role in the parameters of that program, which is expected to be rolled out through regulations by the state Department of Environmental Conservation. It will help the state achieve the emissions reductions required under the 2019 climate law, but Hochul has raised concerns about the costs of the program and sought to rewrite the law to reduce the emissions captured by the measure.

“We’re focusing on aggressive climate protections but we have to make sure that they're affordable for New Yorkers or it won't work,” she said.

Hochul also said that a measure to allow the New York Power Authority to build new renewables was included in the deal. The measure will include labor standards, allow but not require NYPA to work with the private sector on renewable projects and includes the “renewable energy access and community help” program for NYPA to provide bill credits to low-income residents to reduce their utility costs, according to the governor’s office.

Assemblymember Ken Zebrowski (D-Rockland County) said the details of the NYPA measure are among the open issues: “Hopefully there is a full agreement soon and everything can go to print, but those details aren’t all worked out yet."

Hochul also announced the Environmental Protection Fund would be kept at $400 million; $500 million in additional funding would go to water infrastructure.

Lawmakers have also agreed to Hochul’s proposal of $200 million for utility bill relief and $200 million for a NYSERDA program to weatherize and electrify the homes of some low-income New Yorkers.

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Government report shows steep decline in FBI’s ‘backdoor searches’ on Americans

The Biden administration has a new argument in its uphill battle to sell Congress on renewing a controversial electronic surveillance statute: it can rein in abuses of the program itself.

The number of times FBI personnel sought information on Americans within a repository of data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act fell more than 95 percent in 2022 from 2021, according to a much anticipated transparency report on U.S. spying released Friday.

The decline follows a series of reforms the FBI instituted in the summer of 2021 to curtail searches of the database for information on Americans who correspond with surveilled foreigners.

At the heart of the battle: Section 702 is a powerful spying program that allows the intelligence community to snoop on the emails and other digital communications of foreigners located abroad. But the FBI does not need a warrant to search communications that have already been collected under the statute — and its growing use, and misuse, of those powers to snoop on Americans in recent years have made lawmakers reticent about reupping the program as is.

Showing restraint: The substantial decline documented within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2023 Annual Statistical Transparency Report buttresses the administration’s claims that it has managed to rein in FBI searches on Americans, a senior FBI official told reporters ahead of the report’s release.

The report “aptly illustrates how built-in oversight that Congress put in the statute works to … repair trust and transparency,” said the official, who provided the briefing to reporters on condition of anonymity.

The data: The FBI sifted through — or “queried” in intelligence community parlance — the 702 database for details on Americans roughly 120,000 times last year after conducting nearly 3 million such searches in 2021 and 850,000 thousand searches in 2020, the report says.

The bureau conducted those 120,000 searches due to alleged connections to foreign spies and security threats.

The bureau also has the ability to scour through the database for details on purely domestic crimes — another hot-button issue that has surfaced amid the reauthorization debate. But the FBI made only 16 such searches last year and 14 the year prior, according to the report.

Zooming out: The new report is the first to disclose the impact of a series of fixes the intelligence community implemented in 2021 after a secret intelligence court overseeing the program determined in rulings from 2021 and 2020 that the bureau committed “apparent widespread violations of the querying standard.”

The reforms amounted to a series of internal measures to discourage bureau personnel from improperly probing the database, like requiring agents to affirmatively opt-in to 702 searches and setting an upper limit on the number of terms that could be used at a time.

Falling on deaf ears: But the new data doesn't appear to be getting traction with lawmakers who believe the spying program should not be reauthorized absent new safeguards for the federal law enforcement agency.

"While there was a sharp decline in U.S. person queries from December 2021 to November 2022, it is incumbent upon Congress, not the Executive Branch, to codify reforms to FISA Section 702," Reps. Mike Turner (R-Oh.) and Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) said in a statement upon the report's release.

“Today’s report highlights the urgent need for reforms to government surveillance programs in order to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans," added Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime privacy advocate, in a statement.

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Think Manchin has coal connections? Meet his rival.

West Virginia voters may swap one coal boss for an even bigger one.

Republican Gov. Jim Justice jumped into the race Thursday to challenge Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, setting up a potential collision between two politicians with deep connections to the state’s coal industry.

Justice, who was included on Forbes' billionaires list as recently as 2020, has profited from family businesses in the fossil fuel industry across Appalachia. Recent polling shows he is the strongest candidate vying for the Republican nomination to challenge Manchin.

His entrance catapults the race into one of the highest-profile political battles of 2024, with the possibility of showcasing both men’s personal ties to an energy industry that President Joe Biden and other world leaders have promised to largely replace with renewable power.

Manchin, perhaps the most vulnerable Senate Democrat, confounded members of his party by stalling major legislation aimed at reducing fossil fuel use. But by ultimately voting for the Inflation Reduction Act, which pours hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy, he risks losing support among voters with ties to coal.

Both men have earned millions from their families’ fossil fuel businesses.

Over the years, Justice’s family coal businesses have collected millions of dollars in state and federal fines for pollution and public safety violations. The businesses have a long history of ignoring those fines or paying them after years of protracted legal efforts.

Manchin’s political position has benefited his business interests, which include a family company that trucks discarded coal to a high-emitting power plant near his hometown. The facility is the only plant in West Virginia that still uses waste coal to generate electricity.

Accusations around conflicts of interest have followed Justice, 72, and Manchin, 75, through much of their careers. But that has not slowed their political rise in West Virginia, said Rob Cornelius, the former chair of the Wood County Republican Executive Committee and a critic of Justice, whom he described as “Teflon as hell.”

“We expect our leaders to be a little dirty, I guess is the nice way of putting it,” Cornelius said. “No one here cares about what I would call government and business corruption, and that’s probably an indictment of our voters.”

A spokesperson for Justice did not respond to requests for comment.

Manchin has said he will not make a decision about his political future until the end of the year. That could include running for reelection, launching an independent bid for president or retiring. Manchin has been increasingly critical of the Biden administration and his fellow Democrats in recent months, particularly over energy issues.

“Senator Manchin continues to consider the best way he can serve his state and country," Sam Runyon, a Manchin spokesperson, said in a statement. "But make no mistake, he will win whatever race he enters.”

West Virginia remains almost entirely reliant on coal for its power, even as other states move toward cheaper renewables and natural gas. The state gets 90 percent of its power from coal, compared with about 20 percent nationally (Greenwire, Jan. 26). In recent months, Justice has fought to keep the state’s largest coal-fired power plant from closing — a move that could cost ratepayers more than $30 million in additional monthly costs.

Justice’s financial disclosures show that his family’s sprawling business empire extends to more than a hundred businesses, including in energy, hospitality, health care, resorts and timber. Justice’s family owns dozens of coal-related businesses based in West Virginia, Virginia and Alabama and elsewhere, his financial disclosures show.

Those companies, many of which operate mines, have faced millions of dollars in fines for air pollution and unsafe working conditions. They have missed numerous deadlines to pay those fines after being sued by the U.S. attorney’s office and the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Justice has also faced liabilities related to land reclamation on the surface mines owned by his companies. At one time, the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy estimated that the companies had about $200 million in such liabilities.

Recently, the Bluestone Coke facility in Alabama, which is owned by Justice’s family, had to pay a fine of almost $1 million for releasing an excessive amount of toxic air pollution that affected a Black neighborhood for years, a ProPublica investigation revealed. The Birmingham facility repeatedly ignored public health concerns, resulting in the largest fine being proposed in the history of the Jefferson County Board of Health.

Justice’s family is considering a sale of Bluestone, The Wall Street Journal reported last month.

In 2009, Justice bought the 6,500-acre Greenbrier luxury resort in White Sulphur Springs, and then built a casino underneath it. The resort was home to a secret congressional bunker that has since been decommissioned. It is also the site of his planned remarks Thursday evening in which he is expected to officially announce his candidacy.

The personal ties that Justice and Manchin have to the coal industry may raise questions in such a high-profile race, but that is “not new information for people in West Virginia,” said Conrad Lucas, a former chair of the West Virginia Republican Party.

He said voters have looked at those entanglements and repeatedly elected both men.

Justice, despite his wealth, has cultivated the image of someone who is approachable to the average West Virginian, Lucas said, “despite him being a figure who owns the Greenbrier.”

“He has an ability to connect with voters that you wouldn’t think an incredibly wealthy person would, but voters have found him incredibly relatable,” Lucas said.

Justice is one of the most popular governors in the country. A Morning Consult poll conducted in January found that Justice was the fifth-most-liked governor, with a 64 percent approval rating.

Justice leads Manchin 52 percent to 42 percent among likely voters, according to a poll from the Senate Leadership Fund, the super political action committee aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). The only other declared candidate in the race, Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.), trails Manchin by 15 percentage points, the poll showed.

West Virginia is among the reddest states in the country. Former President Donald Trump, who could once again be at the top of the ticket, won the state by almost 40 percentage points in 2020. The Senate race, and especially the Republican primary, are widely expected to be the most expensive in state history. A poll released earlier this month by National Public Affairs showed Justice outpacing Mooney by 31 points.

Mooney “looks forward to a robust debate of the issues important to all West Virginians including Justice’s record,” his campaign manager, John Findlay, said in a statement before the governor entered the race.

If he wins, Justice would arrive in Washington not as a power broker, as Manchin has been in the closely divided Senate, but as a backbench Republican. His personal wealth and potential for raising campaign contributions could elevate his standing within the Republican Party, but he wouldn’t be the decisive vote on major legislation.

But there are similarities between Justice and Manchin that go beyond making money on coal. Manchin’s close friend and former chief of staff, Larry Puccio, has worked for both men’s campaigns.

At the federal level, Puccio has leveraged his friendship with Manchin to receive lucrative lobbying contracts, as POLITICO’s E&E News has reported. In Charleston, Puccio works as a lobbyist for multiple businesses owned by Justice, including the Greenbrier and Bluestone. Puccio has also worked as chair of Justice’s transition team — as he did for Manchin.

Justice’s extensive business holdings won’t necessarily make him stand out in Congress, said Craig Holman, who lobbies on ethics and campaign finance issues for Public Citizen, the progressive consumer rights group founded by Ralph Nader.

“Lawmakers here in Congress do have very strong conflicts of interest and business interests, and they’re not expected to recuse themselves from votes that affect those interests,” he said. “And it is a conflict of interest, an obvious one, and it’s rather prevalent throughout Congress and not really subject to regulation.”

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‘Economy is unwell’: GDP report underlines recession concern

President Joe Biden formally kicked off his 2024 reelection campaign this week by declaring, “I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future.”

Wall Street isn’t sharing his enthusiasm.

Across the financial industry, the overwhelming consensus is that the economy will struggle this year, with more than a dozen big banks in recent weeks forecasting little or no growth — or even a recession — as the Federal Reserve drives up interest rates to kill inflation.

And fresh risks loom for Biden’s reelection campaign economy, including a potentially market-shaking fight over raising the debt limit and the risk of a banking industry meltdown that’s causing lenders to tighten up on credit.

"The U.S. economy is unwell, and it’s starting to show," Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, tweeted Thursday morning.

The government’s latest GDP report Thursday underlined those concerns. The Commerce Department reported the economy expanded by just 1.1 percent in the first three months of the year, well below expectations of 2 percent growth and down from 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.

Biden’s bullish comments echoed President Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” reelection theme from 1984. Yet unlike then, the economy is clearly slowing now, presenting Biden with a potential hurdle to his securing a second term.

Still, the GDP report included some bright spots, including continued strong consumer spending, which drives about two-thirds of economic growth. And the economy has remained remarkably resilient, adding over 300,000 jobs per month in the first quarter, something Biden noted in comments on the growth figures on Thursday.

“Today, we learned that the American economy remains strong, as it transitions to steady and stable growth,” the president said in a prepared statement. “This past quarter, real personal disposable income increased and American consumers continued to spend, even as the overall pace of growth moderated.”

Yet most Wall Street banks and many economists — even left-leaning allies of Biden — predict a downshift once the impact of all the Fed rate hikes works through the system along with the fallout from tighter credit standards.

“We continue to expect economic growth to slow, and we are preparing for a range of scenarios,” Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said on the bank’s recent first-quarter earnings call.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said on a call last week: “We see and our experts see a mild recession coming.”

Similar comments are peppering earnings calls across the finance industry. Few executives are predicting a major decline in the economy, but many believe the long run of modest or better growth will finally come to a close with the jobless rate starting to rise again from record lows.

And even some Biden allies like former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers are warning that the economy will have to decline significantly to finally break the back of inflation.

“I think we’re going to have difficulty getting near a 2 percent inflation target until and unless the economy slows down substantially,” Summers said at an investment conference this week.

The latest reading on the economy was driven by a declining housing industry slammed by higher interest rates. Consumer spending remained resilient but is also likely to come under more pressure as Covid-era savings run out and inflation continues to pinch wallets. And the report showed inflation rising, not falling as the Fed expects, meaning another rate hike is likely when central bank policymakers meet next week.

“This morning’s data was the worst of both worlds, with growth down and inflation up,” Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for Independent Advisor Alliance, said in a client note.

And even Biden, in his reelection announcement, acknowledged that while he envisions greater prosperity ahead, he is aware of the risks, including prices that remain too high.

“We’ve got a lot more work to do, though,” he told union workers. “I know folks are struggling with inflation," he said, but added that "it’s a global problem.”

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Wall Street gives administration earful over antitrust enforcement

Wall Street dealmakers have dialed up their complaints to the White House over the last year as the administration's top antitrust enforcers — FTC Chair Lina Khan and DOJ antitrust head Jonathan Kanter — knuckle down on merger activity they say would damage the economy, according to Biden officials and financial industry executives.

One senior administration official — who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations with business leaders — told POLITICO that they view the objections as a sign that Biden’s competition policy and staffing choices are working.

The volume of M&A activity has fallen sharply over the last year and dealmakers say the effect of President Joe Biden’s antitrust crackdown has also been felt in ways that won’t show up in the data. It’s not just the deals they attempt to stop — it’s the deals that never get proposed to a corporate board, for fear of having to subject their transactions to combative regulators.

“It's been a sea change in the regulatory environment over the past two and a half years since the Biden Administration took office,” Roger Altman, the senior chair of investment bank Evercore, and a former Deputy Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, said last month on CNBC. Antitrust officials have already stymied “a series of business combinations which would have gone ahead in a different environment.”

In the last two years, a string of high profile transactions have been abandoned after being challenged by the government. Those include Aon and Willis Towers Watson calling off their merger in 2021 after a DOJ lawsuit, as well as the abandonments of Lockheed Martin’s takeover of Aerojet Rocketdyne and Nvidia’s purchase of microchip designer Arm following FTC lawsuits.

And some companies are sometimes willing to sell at a lower price if they believe a higher offer will raise a deal’s profile and generate greater regulatory risk, according to one banker focused on the technology sector, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Low interest rates and a flood of fiscal stimulus pumped mergers and acquisition activity and deal sizes to record heights in 2021. But the bonanza faded as inflation set in, prompting the Federal Reserve to quickly raise rates in an attempt to squash surging prices. Cheap financing, a critical lubricant to deal pipelines for large corporations and private equity shops, dried up as Khan and Kanter began cracking down.

So, while economic conditions played a significant role in the slowdown in M&A, the approach taken by Biden’s appointees created additional hurdles for companies that would otherwise expand through acquisitions, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President and Chief Policy Officer Neil Bradley said in an interview. Publicly traded companies are increasingly identifying the FTC, which also enforces consumer protection standards, as a public policy risk, according to the Chamber’s research.

There is “much greater uncertainty that [companies are] receiving from M&A attorneys about how long it will take — and the likelihood for — getting FTC sign off,” he said. Some chamber members have informed him that they’ve “walked away from deals because the uncertainty was too great.”

So far, the drop-off has had more of an effect on the whales than the minnows. A pause in so-called megadeals — which refers to transactions valued north of $10 billion — was the primary reason annual deal volume declined by more than a third last year, according to research compiled by Bain & Company.

“There's still some purchases going on,” the senior Biden economic official said, adding that the FTC and DOJ are ensuring “that M&A activity is actually promoting what is fundamentally an economy that's built on the idea of permitting competition and driving economic value.”

Nevertheless, the overall declines have been felt by major investment banks that count on underwriting and advisory fees. Goldman Sachs last week reported that its investment banking revenues had fallen by more than a quarter due to the global M&A slowdown. Morgan Stanley also reported declining profits as dealmaking slowed.

Kanter and Khan have embraced the mission set out by Biden in his 2021 competition policy executive order to hit pause on merger activity in a heavily consolidated economy.

Publicly, they have struggled in that effort, losing most of the legal challenges to deals, including lawsuits to block United Health Care’s $13 billion deal for health care technology firm Change, and Meta’s $440 million purchase of virtual reality developer Within Unlimited.

Kanter has said multiple times though that he measures success not just by whether his prosecutors win in court, but in the deals that either get abandoned during the investigative process are never signed at all. “The deterrent effect is powerful and the results are tangible. Simply put — most anticompetitive deals are no longer getting out of the boardroom,” Kanter said at an event last month.

The administration will be tested over the next year, as a number of high-profile merger challenges play out in court. Those include the FTC’s case to block Microsoft’s $69 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard and the DOJ’s case to block the merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines.

“Frankly, before the last two years, I never heard concerns about the idea that people were actually factoring in antitrust as they thought about doing some of these deals,” the official said.

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The old guard: Joe Biden seems like a spring chicken compared to some of these guys

The US president would be 86 at the end of his second term, and he wouldn’t be alone in leading a country at such an advanced age.

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Guardsman spoke of ‘murder,’ may still possess secrets: U.S.

WORCESTER, Mass. — The Massachusetts Air National guardsman accused of leaking highly classified military documents kept an arsenal of guns, talked of “violence and murder” on a social media platform and an “assassination van,” prosecutors wrote before Thursday’s hearing for 21-year-old Jack Teixeira.

The court filings raise new questions about why Teixeira had such a high security clearance and access to some of the nation’s most classified secrets. They said he may still have material that hasn’t been released, which could be of “tremendous value to hostile nation states that could offer him safe harbor and attempt to facilitate his escape from the United States.”

Teixeira entered his detention hearing in Worcester on Thursday in orange prison garb, smiling at his father in the front row. His handcuffs were removed before he sat down.

One possibility is that the judge could order Teixeira to be confined at his father’s home while awaiting trial, if not held in jail. Under questioning at the hearing, his father, Jack Michael Teixeira, said he was aware that if his son were to violate conditions of release or home confinement, he’d have to report him. The elder Teixeira said he owns firearms but no longer has any in his home.

Nadine Pellegrini, chief of national security division in the Massachusetts U.S. attorney’s office, told the judge the information prosecutors submitted to the court about the defendant’s threatening words and behavior “is not speculation, it is not hyperbole, nor is it the creation of a caricature. It is based on what we know to date ... directly based upon the words and actions of this defendant.”

Late Wednesday, the Air Force announced it suspended the commander of the 102nd Intelligence Support Squadron where Teixeira worked and the administrative commander “overseeing the support for the unit mobilized under federal orders,” pending further investigation. It also temporarily removed each leader’s access to classified systems and information.

Court papers urging a federal judge to keep Teixeira in custody detailed a troubling history going back to high school, where he was suspended when a classmate overheard him discussing Molotov cocktails and other weapons as well as racial threats. More recently, prosecutors said, he used his government computer to research past mass shootings and standoffs with federal agents.

He remains a grave threat to national security and a flight risk, prosecutors wrote, and investigators are still trying to determine whether he kept any physical or digital copies of classified information, including files that haven’t already surfaced publicly.

“There simply is no condition or combination of conditions that can ensure the Defendant will not further disclose additional information still in his knowledge or possession,” prosecutors wrote. “The damage the Defendant has already caused to the U.S. national security is immense. The damage the Defendant is still capable of causing is extraordinary.”

Teixeira has been in jail since his arrest earlier this month on charges stemming from the greatest known intelligence leak in years.

Teixeira has been charged under the Espionage Act with unauthorized retention and transmission of classified national defense information. He has not yet entered a plea.

His lawyers are urging the judge to release him from jail, arguing in court papers filed Thursday that appropriate conditions can be set even if the court finds him to be a flight risk — such as confinement at his father’s home and location monitoring.

The defense said Teixeira no longer has access to any top-secret information and accused prosecutors of providing “little more than speculation that a foreign adversary will seduce Mr. Teixeira and orchestrate his clandestine escape from the United States.”

“The government’s allegations ... offer no support that Mr. Teixeira currently, or ever, intended any information purportedly to the private social media server to be widely disseminated,” they wrote. “Thus, its argument that Mr. Teixeira will continue to release information or destroy evidence if not detained rings hollow.”

He is accused of distributing highly classified documents about top national security issues in a chat room on Discord, a social media platform that started as a hangout for gamers. The leak stunned military officials, sparked an international uproar and raised fresh questions about America’s ability to safeguard its secrets.

The leaked documents appear to detail U.S. and NATO aid to Ukraine and U.S. intelligence assessments regarding U.S. allies that could strain ties with those nations. Some show real-time details from February and March of Ukraine’s and Russia’s battlefield positions and precise numbers of battlefield gear lost and newly flowing into Ukraine from its allies.

Prosecutors wrote that Teixeira, who owned multiple guns, repeatedly had “detailed and troubling discussions about violence and murder” on the platform where authorities say he shared the documents. In February, he told another person that he was tempted to make a minivan into an “assassination van,” prosecutors wrote.

The Justice Department’s filing outlines a pattern of troubling behavior that officials say began well before he entered the military and continued in recent months, even as his position afforded him access to government secrets.

In 2018, prosecutors allege, Teixeira was suspended after a classmate “overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats.” His initial application for a firearms identification card that same year was denied due to police department concerns over those remarks.

He applied again over the next two years, and cited in his 2020 application after joining the Guard “his position of trust in the United States government as a reason he could be trusted to possess a firearm,” prosecutors wrote.

The Justice Department said that it has also learned through its investigation that Teixeira in July used his government computer to look up a series of U.S. mass shootings and government standoffs, including the terms “Ruby Ridge,” “Las Vegas shooting,” “Mandalay Bay shooting,” “Uvalde” and “Buffalo tops shooting” — an apparent reference to the 2022 racist mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket.

The searches of mass shootings on a government computer should have triggered the computer to generate an immediate referral to security, which could have then led to a more in-depth review of Teixeira’s file, according to Dan Meyer, a lawyer who specializes in military, federal employment and security clearance issues. The Air Force’s investigation will probably discover whether a referral was generated — and whether security officers did anything with the information.

Teixeira’s lawyers noted that he has no criminal history and would have no access to guns if he was released. The incident at his high school was “thoroughly investigated” and he was allowed to come back after a few days and a professional psychological evaluation, they wrote. That investigation was “fully known and vetted ” by the Air National Guard before he enlisted and when he obtained his top secret security clearance, they said.

Months later, after news outlets began reporting on the documents leak, Teixeira took steps to destroy evidence after news outlets began reporting on the documents leak. Authorities who searched a dumpster at his home found a smashed laptop, tablet and Xbox gaming console, they said.

Authorities have not alleged a motive. Members of the Discord group have described Teixeira as someone looking to show off, rather than being motivated by a desire to inform the public about U.S. military operations or to influence American policy.

Billing records the FBI obtained from Discord were among the things that led authorities to Teixeira, who enlisted in the Air National Guard in September 2019. A Discord user told the FBI that a username linked to Teixeira began posting what appeared to be classified information roughly in December.

Teixeira was detected on April 6 — the day The New York Times first published a story about the breach of documents — searching for the word “leak” in a classified system, according to court papers. The FBI says that was reason to believe Teixeira was trying to find information about the investigation into who was responsible for the leaks.

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