The Sad Case Of Russia Whistleblower Reality Winner
The law is not about right and wrong; it’s who you know that counts.
Reality Winner, a former translator for the National Security Agency (NSA), spent this Thanksgiving with her family for the first time since she was released after being locked up for four painful years in a federal prison. She was 26 when she pleaded guilty in 2018 to releasing to an-line news source a top secret government report that proved Russian interference in support of trump in the 2016 presidential election.
The year 2017 was a time of national turmoil. Reports were growing of alleged Russian collusion with the trump campaign leading up to trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Trump vehemently denied any collusion, leading eventually to his firing the FBI director and later being impeached twice. And in 2017, Winner could not keep secret what she had learned about how the Russians were trying to influence the election.
Winner received the longest sentence ever imposed in federal court for an unauthorized release of government information to the media and was just the eighth whistleblower charged under the Espionage Act in the 100 years since its creation.
Trump is under investigation for pilfering thousands of pages of highly-sensitive, top secret information. His fate is unclear but it is unlikely that he will be charged with violating the Espionage Act and it is beyond belief that trump will ever go to prison, and certainly not for four years.
WNBA star Brittney Griner spent 294 days in a Russian gulag before the U.S. negotiated a deal to free a convicted Russian arms dealer in return for Griner’s freedom. Her plight was a national story that attracted the sympathy of the nation. The government and the country rallied behind Brittney Griner.
That can’t be said for Winner who didn’t attract the attention of people in high places and wasn’t a world class athlete, a decorated military veteran like David Petraeus or a political blue-blood, like James Clapper Jr. Winner has fared so much worse than other, better known Americans.
Former CIA Director Petraeus, a highly decorated U.S. Army general, gave notebooks of top secret information to an author who was his mistress. He was charged with misdemeanor mishandling of classified information and never saw the inside of a jail cell.
In January 2015, the FBI and Justice Department prosecutors recommended bringing felony charges against Petraeus. Eventually, Petraeus pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information. He was sentenced to two years of probation and fined $100,000 for the unauthorized removal and retention of classified material he gave to his mistress.
Clapper Jr. is a former Director of National Intelligence under President Barack Obama. He was unanimously confirmed by the Senate for the position on Aug. 5, 2010, and three years later, documents were leaked detailing the NSA practice of collecting telephone metadata on millions of Americans’ telephone calls. The documents were leaked by computer consultant Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept, the same publication that published the top secret report leaked by Winner. Snowden was charged in 2014 with violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property and has fled to Russia.
Clapper was accused of perjury for previously telling a congressional committee hearing that the NSA does not collect any type of data on millions of Americans. Clapper, who was never charged with a criminal offense, resigned in November 2016. In May 2017, he joined the think tank the Center for a New American Security as a Distinguished Senior Fellow for Intelligence and National Security. In August 2017, CNN hired Clapper as a national security analyst.
In 2008, Gregg Bergersen, a weapons systems policy analyst for the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency, was convicted of selling secrets to the Chinese. FBI surveillance showed him stuffing his pockets with cash. His sentence was six months shorter than Reality Winner’s.
Winner had sought clemency from trump. The clemency request was ignored but in his final days in the White House, trump did pardon 41 people and commuted the sentences of eight others. They included four security contractors convicted of murder and other offenses for slaughtering 14 Iraqi civilians in 2007. The contractors worked for Blackwater Worldwide security company, founded by Trump supporter Erik Prince, the brother of former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
Among others, Trump also pardoned three former Republican congressmen, each of them convicted of federal offenses during the Trump administration. Two had been early and avid supporters of Trump’s campaign.
Winner has asked Biden to pardon her but has not yet heard from the White House.
In contrast, Chelsea Manning was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 for violating the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents. She was imprisoned from 2010 until 2017 when her sentence was commuted by President Obama. WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist.
In an interview with 60 Minutes, Winner said she knew what she was doing when she mailed the secret NSA report to The Intercept.
“I knew it was secret,” she said. “But I also knew that I had pledged service to the American people. And at that point in time, it felt like they were being led astray. My only intent was that maybe one person could restore the foundation of truth and integrity in a really tumultuous year.”
Winner served in the Air Force from 2010 to 2016, rising to the rank of senior airman before she was honorably discharged. While on active duty, she was assigned to the drone program and listened in on intercepted foreign chatter. For her efforts, Winner was awarded the Air Force Commendation Medal for “aiding in 650 enemy captures, 600 enemies killed in action and identifying 900 high value targets.”
After her discharge, she was hired by Pluribus International Corporation, a firm that provides services under contract to the National Security Agency (NSA). She came across a top secret report that proved the trump administration was lying about Russian influence in the 2016 election. The report said that in 2016, the Russian military “executed cyber espionage” against “122… local government organizations” “targeting officials involved in the management of voter registration systems.”
Winner mailed the report anonymously to The Intercept, where a reporter gave a copy to the N.S.A. for verification. Winner was quickly identified and charged under the Espionage Act, which was the law that was used to prosecute major spies including former CIA officer Aldrich Ames, who was convicted of spying for the Soviets, and FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was convicted of spying for Soviet and Russian intelligence services for 25 years.
The first civilian whistleblower to be charged with violating the Espionage Act was Daniel Ellsberg, who triggered a national political controversy when he leaked to the media the top secret Pentagon Papers, exposing American decision-making in the Vietnam War. Ellsberg was charged in 1973 under the Espionage Act along with other charges of theft and conspiracy. He faced a total maximum sentence of 115 years but the charges were dismissed because of governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering.
Other whistleblowers the government has charged with violating the Espionage Act include WikiLeaks’ founder Assange and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Assange is currently in a maximum-security prison in London, while Snowden lives in Russia, where he has been granted permanent residency.
Betsy Reed, editor of The Intercept, lauded Winner for having the bravery to release the secret report.
“The vulnerability of the American electoral system is a national topic of immense gravity, but it took Winner’s act of bravery to bring key details of an attempt to compromise the democratic process in 2016 to public attention,” Reed said. “Instead of being recognized as a conscience-driven whistle-blower whose disclosure helped protect U.S. elections, Winner was prosecuted with vicious resolve.”
Among her many supporters, Assange wrote on Twitter that “Winner is no Clapper or Petraeus with ‘elite immunity’. She’s a young woman against the wall for talking to the press.”
A “Stand with Reality” campaign was formed by representatives from various press freedom groups, including Courage to Resist, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation with the goal of “raising public awareness” to ensure that Reality Winner received a fair trial.
Courage to Resist (CTR) was formed during the early part of the Iraq War to support U.S military war resisters. CTR’s support committee said, “the charge against Winner is grossly disproportionate to her alleged offense, and is designed to create a chilling effect on investigative journalism by dissuading sources from sharing information that is critical to the public interest.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was formed in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties. It provides funds for legal defense in court, presents amicus curiae briefs, defends individuals and new technologies from what it considers abusive legal threats, works to expose government malfeasance among other activities.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s board of directors has included prominent journalists and whistleblowers such as Ellsberg, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Xeni Jardin, as well as activists, celebrities, and filmmakers.
Poitras is a director and producer of documentary films and has won many awards including the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Citizenfour, about Snowden. Reporting by Poitras and others on the NSA won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Poitras was one of the founding editors of The Intercept and was fired, allegedly in connection with the Reality Winner story.
Greenwald is a journalist, author and lawyer who co-founded The Intercept until he resigned in October 2020. Jardin is a former co-editor of the collaborative weblog “Boing Boing,” a former contributor to Wired Magazine and Wired News, and a former correspondent for the National Public Radio show “Day to Day.” She also has been a guest technology news commentator for PBS NewsHour, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and ABC.
In 2019, The Guardian compared Winner’s case to those of Daniel Everette Hale and of Henry Kyle Frese.
Frese was a former employee at the Defense Intelligence Agency between February 2018 and October 2019. He was charged with two violations of the Espionage Act for giving national defense Information to newspaper reporters. Frese pleaded guilty to the willful transmission of Top Secret national defense information. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison after prosecutors sought nine years imprisonment.
Hale is a former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst who leaked classified information about drone warfare to The Intercept. In 2021, he pleaded guilty to retaining and transmitting national defense information and was sentenced to 45 months in prison.