The US airman who admitted to leaking a trove of classified Pentagon documents will face a separate military trial, an Air Force spokesperson said on Monday.

Jack Teixeira orchestrated the most damaging leak of US classified information in a decade while serving as a junior Massachusetts Air National Guard IT specialist, posting highly sensitive documents on the social media platform Discord, from which they spread across the internet.

"The charges were officially referred to trial on 2 July 2024," the Air Force spokesperson said, adding: "The trial will take place at Hanscom Air Force Base, MA, but the date is to be determined."

Teixeira was arrested in April 2023 and could spend up to nearly 17 years in prison after pleading guilty in March to six federal counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information.

Because he was on active duty at the time of the offenses, he was subject to both federal law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and he will face a military trial for alleged violations of the latter.

The charges are that Teixeira violated the UCMJ by failing to obey an order to stop accessing information that did not pertain to his duties, and seeking to obstruct justice by disposing of an iPad, hard drive and phone.

The documents leaked by Teixeira pointed to US concern over Ukraine's military capacity against invading Russian forces, and also showed Washington had apparently spied on allies Israel and South Korea, among other sensitive details.

It was the biggest such breach since the 2013 dump of National Security Agency documents by Edward Snowden, and raised serious questions about access by Teixeira and other junior staffers to high-level secrets.