NSA leaker Reality Winner released from prison, attorney says

Reality Leigh Winner, the former National Security Agency contractor sentenced for leaking classified government information, has been released from prison and is now in a Texas halfway house, her attorney said Monday.

Winner was serving a sentence of five years and three months at Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, after being convicted in 2018 of a single count of transmitting national security information. Prosecutors said at the time her sentence was the longest ever imposed for leaking government information to the news media.

In a statement, her lawyer, Alison Grinter Allen, said Winner and her family are working to “heal the trauma of incarceration and build back the years lost.”

Winner was the first person to be prosecuted by President Donald Trump’s administration for leaking sensitive government information. She had pleaded guilty to sending to the news media a top-secret National Security Agency report about Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

The former Air Force translator worked as a contractor at a National Security Agency office in Augusta, where she printed a classified report and left the building with it tucked into her garments. Winner told the FBI she mailed the document to an online news outlet.

Authorities never identified the news organization. But the Justice Department announced Winner’s June 2017 arrest the same day The Intercept reported on a secret NSA document. It detailed Russian government efforts to penetrate a Florida-based supplier of voting software and the accounts of election officials ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The NSA report was dated May 5, the same as the document Winner had leaked.

Before she was arrested, Winner spent months unleashing a tirade of social media posts calling Trump, among other things, an “orange fascist” and “Tangerine in Chief.” Winner has said she voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. She also wrote in a notebook seized by authorities that she wanted to “burn the White House down” and then flee overseas, according to federal prosecutors.

“All of these actions I did willfully, meaning I did them of my own free will,” she told the court while entering a guilty plea.

Winner had filed a petition for a compassionate release due to the coronavirus. According to the motion filed last year, Winner has preexisting conditions that make her more susceptible to being infected with COVID-19.

The government prosecuted Winner under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law aimed at spies.

An affidavit by FBI agent Justin Garrick said the government found out about the leaked documents from the news outlet that received them. He said the agency that housed the report was able to identify six people — including Winner — who had made copies of the report.

In a telephone interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in August 2018, Winner said she was not the leftist activist portrayed by her critics. She expressed regret for her actions, saying she was young, naive and frustrated at the two-party election system.

“I’m not sort of this bleeding-heart liberal Bernie (Sanders) supporter, either,” Winner told the AJC. “I’m so in the middle. I don’t even like to associate with either party. So it’s just so surreal to see this being polarized in such a way.

“To anybody that would say I’m a traitor, I would just welcome them to have a conversation with me,” she said.

Winner’s supporters have hailed her as a patriot, while her critics have blasted her as a naïve and reckless leaker whose actions could deter others carrying more explosive government information.