Former U.S. government intelligence contractor Reality Winner, who pleaded guilty to leaking a top-secret National Security Agency (NSA) report on Russian hacking, was sentenced to more than five years in prison by a federal judge on Aug. 23. Prosecutors said the sentence is the longest ever imposed for criminal leaking to the media.
Winner, 26, pleaded guilty in June. While working as an NSA contractor, she printed a top-secret report, smuggled it out of the agency’s Augusta, Georgia, building in her pantyhose, and mailed it to a news organization that was never publicly identified.
Winner made the admission to FBI agents who interviewed her at her home in Augusta.
During a hearing in Winner’s hometown of Augusta, Judge James Hall approved her lawyers’ request for the 63-month sentence followed by three years of supervised release.
“The sentence and accompanying plea agreement both reflect that Reality recognizes that actions have consequences and that she has learned from her mistake and is prepared to accept the consequences of her actions,” Winner’s attorneys said in a statement.
Hall also agreed to let Winner be transferred to a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, where she could receive medical services and be closer to her family.
Prosecutors said that Winner’s tough sentence is appropriate because she had betrayed her colleagues and her country.
“Make no mistake: This was not a victimless crime,” U.S. Attorney Bobby Christine said in a statement. “Winner’s purposeful violation put our nation’s security at risk. ... She was the quintessential example of an insider threat.”
Winner grew up in Kingsville, Texas. After graduating high school, she enlisted in the Air Force, and became a linguist and provided real-time translation to Americans on field missions during her four years at the NSA in Fort Mead, Maryland.
She left the military and became a civilian contractor for the NSA in February 2017. Her job was to translate documents into English from Farsi. Winner worked with Pluribus International Corp., which provides analytical services for intelligence and defense agencies.
The document Winner leaked consisted of five pages detailing several hacking attempts by Russian intelligence operatives from August to November 2016, days before the presidential election. The hackers targeted a voting machine company as well as a list of local government organizations, according to the report.
In a sentencing memo, prosecutors wrote that “subject matter experts have assessed that the defendant’s unauthorized disclosure caused exceptionally grave harm to our national security.”
The dates of the hacking attempts detailed in the report leaked by Winner overlap with those in the July 13 indictment this year of 12 Russian intelligence officers by special counsel Robert Mueller, but the activities described don’t match up, suggesting that a hacking operation separate from the one alleged by Mueller was active in 2016. The special counsel’s indictment details an operation that started in March 2016 and similarly lasted through November that year.
During the interview prior to her arrest, Winner expressed hopelessness and frustration with her workplace, detailing how she filed formal complaints “about them having Fox News on.”
“I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” she said.
“Look, I only say ‘I hate America’ like 3 times a day,” she once wrote to her sister.
Avalanche of Leaks
By the time Winner was arrested, the administration of President Donald Trump faced an unprecedented wave of leaks. From Jan. 20 to May 25 last year, the administration suffered 125 leaks of information potentially damaging to national security, a rate of one per day, according to a report by the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.Leaks were occurring at a rate seven times higher than the two previous administrations, according to the report. The majority of the disclosures at the time, 78 in total, were, like Winner’s, focused on the subject of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“But the leak frenzy has gone far beyond the Kremlin and has extended to other sensitive information that could harm national security,” the report stated at the time. “President Trump’s private conversations with other foreign leaders have shown up in the press, while secret operations targeting America’s most deadly adversaries were exposed in detail.”
Winner’s social-media postings indicated an animus against the president. At the time of her leak, almost every leak reviewed by the senators concerned Trump and his administration. During the comparable period of the Obama era, only half the leaks were about President Barack Obama and his administration.
