The Story of Reality Winner

The Story of Reality Winner
Dec 22, 2023

With the revelation that the US Government is looking for yet more
classfied documents which 'disappeared' when former President
Donald Trump left office, and with his documents trial looming ever
larger, we thought it would be apposite to look back at the case of
Reality Winner, who leaked ONE document and paid the price. A price
Trump has yet to even challenge in court.

Relity Winner was a former intelligence contractor who was
imprisoned for leaking a report about Russian interference in the
US presidential election that Donald Trump won in 2016 has insisted
she acted out of love for a nation that was “being lied to”.

“I am not a traitor – I am not a spy,” Reality Winner said in an
interview aired Sunday on CBS’ 60 Minutes. “I am somebody who only
acted out of love for what this country stands for.”

In some of her most extensive remarks about her case since she was
freed from prison last year for good behavior, Winner portrayed
herself living as normal a life as possible in Texas, teaching yoga
and fitness while also being a pet owner, daughter and sister named
after a pun of her family’s surname and her father’s wish to have a
“real winner”.

The 30-year-old also gave perhaps the most detailed account yet
about the day she decided to leave her National Security Agency
contractor’s office at the Fort Gordon army base in Georgia with an
intelligence report about Russian attempts to meddle in the
election that saw Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the White
House.

Working for NSA contractor Pluribus International Corporation,
Winner printed the document – labeled “TOP SECRET” – that explained
how Russian military intelligence officials hacked at least one
supplier of voting software and tried to break into more than 100
local election systems before the polls closed in 2016.

She tucked the report into the pantyhose underneath her dress and
walked out of her office at the Fort Gordon army base in Georgia
before the document became the basis of an article published on the
Intercept news site.

Federal authorities announced that Winner had been arrested about
an hour after that article came out. The Trump administration had
her charged under the Espionage Act, which was initially created
during the first world war as a means to punish people spying on
the US during times of foreign conflict.

Winner pleaded guilty as part of a deal with prosecutors that
called for her to be sentenced to five years in prison beginning in
2018. Authorities said the sentence was the longest ever handed
down by a US federal court to someone convicted of providing
government information to the media without permission.

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