Leak suspect a study in contrasts
Reality Winner’s quiet demeanor masked a fierce competitor whose frustration may have boiled over.
As a high school kid growing up on acres of farmland miles off a rural highway, Jaykob Elizondo sometimes threw parties when his parents were away. With the goats, chickens and rabbits on his family’s property serving as the only witnesses, Elizondo and his pals enjoyed flexing a little freedom. But the girl on the other side of the fence was never part of the action.
Reality Winner wasn’t one to break the rules.
“She wasn’t a party animal or anything like that,” said Elizondo, now a dad and prepared for whatever high jinks his kids cook up in their teen years. “She didn’t want to get in trouble.”
Winner, now 25, stayed out of trouble until last month, when, prosecutors allege, she leaked a top-secret document on Russian
attempts to hack U.S. election systems to the news media. The report summarizes an effort last year by the Russian security services to hack a Florida-based election software provider and then use that information to try to gain access to the voter registration systems of several unnamed local governments.
On Thursday, Winner appeared in an Augusta, Ga., courtroom, clad in an orange jumpsuit and her legs in shackles, as prosecutors accused her of being a jihad- ist sympathizer who wrote of wanting to “burn the White House down.”
If convicted, she faces up to 10 years in federal prison. She has pleaded not guilty and, denied bond, remains in jail.
Her case is the first pros- ecution of an American for leaking government infor- mation since the election of President Donald Trump, who has demanded harsh treatment for leakers.
For friends and family, it’s been an unexpected turn for a young woman who left the Air Force last year with a commendation for her role in helping allied forces iden- tify and kill more than 600 enemy combatants and capture 650.
Winner’s journey from the rural landscape of South Texas to a jail cell in eastern Georgia included four years at Fort Meade, Md., where she honed her skills as a lin- guist specializing in the war in Afghanistan. Interviews with those who
know her describe a driven young woman who taught herself Arabic while still in
high school, a competitive athlete who couldn’t stand to lose and would get angry when she did and a person of many acquaintances but
few close friends. Flashes of that anger sur
faced in Winner’s social media posts, referring to Trump as an “orange fascist.”
At her bail hearing, prosecutors suggested Winner had more ominous inten- tions than leaking a five-
page report about the Russians to the news media and planned to steal more classified material.
“The defendant has a sepa- rate life,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Solari told the court. “She has two faces, so to speak.”
Winner’s Facebook page filled with critics blasting
her as a traitor soon after her arrest was announced,
b ut a GoFundMe page launched on her behalf has drawn $30,000 in donations, with comedian Rosie O’Donnell chipping in $1,000 and WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange urging support.
Estranged father
Winner was born in Alice and attended a faith-based elementary school before public middle school in Ricardo and then high school in Kingsville. Her parents divorced in 1999, when she was 7 and her sister was 8.
Her relationship with her father, Ronald Winner, would become strained over the years, according to her mother, Billie Winner-Da- vis. Ronald Winner strug- gled with back injuries and addiction to painkillers. He would make promises to his daughters, such as someday traveling to Central America to see the Mayan ruins, but not keep them.
Though Reality Winner loved her father dearly, the girls couldn’t depend on him, Winner’s mother said. She went years without seeing him.
Winner had a close relationship with her stepfather, Gary Davis, posting last year on her now-shuttered Face- book page, “Just a reminder on Father’s Day how awesome it is having a dad like Gary Davis!”
She loved animals, played the guitar and kept a strict, often vegan diet.
“She’s a good kid. She’s never been in trouble in her life,” Gary Davis said. “She turned down a full-ride scholarship to go to Texas A&M University in Kingsville to go to the Air Force in hopes of becoming a linguist. She pursues whatever she does
with a passion.”
Learning Arabic
As a senior airman, Winner became proficient in Farsi, Dari and Pashto, languages spoken in Iran and Afghanistan.
Her parents could only speculate on why she chose a military life over college. Winner was an excellent student in high school, her mother said.
But her priorities changed suddenly during her senior year, her stepfather said. She started exercising more. She wanted to learn Arabic. They came home once to find she had posted sticky notes all over the house with words in Arabic and their English translations.
Gary Davis said she has an older stepbrother who is a sergeant and a Russian linguist for the Air Force. But they aren’t too close. “That may have been the genesis of what she thought about,” Davis said. “I don’t know.”
After Winner enlisted, she perfected her skills during two years of training at the Defensive Language Insti
tute in Monterey, Calif. She became attached to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade.
As to why she got out after a single tour, the prosecu- tion and her parents diverge.
Prosecutor Solari suggested Thursday, amid her contentions that Winner had a burning desire to travel to hostile countries and meet with terrorist leaders,
that it was because the Air Force wouldn’t deploy her to Afghanistan.
Her parents said it was a combination of politics and altruism.
“She didn’t want to kill people anymore,” Gary Davis said. She wanted to join some humanitarian group, such as the Peace Corps, and give aid to people in countries where she’d been helping the military drop bombs, he said. “She really wanted to go
over to Afghanistan and help the folks there, make it better,” he said.
Winner-Davis recalled another reason Winner cited for wanting to leave the Air Force. “She didn’t like her new boss,” she said, referring to Trump. “She wasn’t going to serve in his military.”
A trip to Belize
Winner’s departure from the Air Force at the end of last year coincided with another major event in her life: the death of her biological father.
Ronald Winner, decimated by heart issues and strokes, died just before Christmas.
He indirectly factored into the bail hearing last week. Solari portrayed Winner as a turncoat who fawned over terrorist leaders, sought to cover her digital tracks and concoct fake identification documents, and wanted to bolt overseas to Nepal or Kurdish territory.
Solari brought up Winner’s Memorial Day weekend trip to Belize, portraying it as a mysterious international movement. “We have little idea what she did there, but she claims to have met with no one,” Solari said.
Winner’s mother and step- father explained that trip: it was about her father’s death and his long-ago promise to take his daughters to see Mayan ruins.
“The trip to Belize was to put closure on that, and to fulfill his dream,” Winner-Davis said. “He always wanted to go to Belize. He wanted to see the ruins, and so she did that, to try to do that for him.”
Life in Augusta
In February, Winner took an analyst job with Alexandria, Va.-based Pluribus International Corp., a con- tractor for the NSA, assigned to Fort Gordon, Ga.
In Augusta, she picked one of the city’s roughest neigh- borhoods to make her home. She found a small, one-story brick house on the internet and entered a rental agreement without looking at it first, her mother said.
She hung crucifixes on the walls and threw Persian rugs on the floors. One wall she decorated with early Beatles album covers. On another, she hung a framed passage from the Quran, written in Arabic, describing the wonders of God. She found her spiritual home at a local Epis
copal church. She put herself through extreme weightlifting ses
sions at her favorite gym. She’d be there every morning at 5:15 a.m., and then return after work and teach a spin
class or work out more, said Lane McLendon, a coach at Winner’s gym.
“She would get super upset and yell if she missed a lift,” McLendon said. “Or if she even completed a lift, she would yell in excitement. It would freak you out.”
Otherwise, Winner kept to herself, he said.
Sharpening views
Winner’s social media posts shed some light on her activities.
On Facebook and Insta- gram, she shared the mundane and, at times, intimate details of her life. She posted pictures of her pets, what she was eating, her work- outs and charity runs.
But while she posted only occasionally about politics on Facebook in recent months, her Twitter feed took on an almost exclusively politi- cal tone.
There, she posted disparaging comments about Trump and voiced support for causes taken up by many progressive millennials.
Her tweets and retweets reveal concerns about climate change, conflicts in the
Middle East and racism in America, and she regularly expressed outrage toward Trump.
She responded to a Twitter post from Javad Zarif, the foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a top Middle Eastern adversary, posting, “If our Tangerine in Chief declares war, we stand with you!”
She followed only 50 Twitter accounts, among them that of famed NSA leaker Edward Snowden, several tied to the activist hacker collective Anonymous, and WikiLeaks. Others she followed included progressive
politicians, the March for Science, the media outlet FiveThirtyEight and “alt” government accounts such as AltFDA that voice dissenting views on Trump administration policies.
‘I screwed up’
Nearly a dozen FBI agents descended on the rental house June 3, surprising Winner as she carried in groceries.
According to the government, agents found notebooks filled with handwritten notes about wanting to burn down the White House and flee to the Middle East or South Asia, fawn
ing thoughts on Taliban leaders, and instructions on how to anonymously access the dark web — where one can find phony IDs and weapons — and make cellphones virtually untraceable, prosecu- tors allege.
Prosecutors said Winner told them she took the doc- ument on election hacking because she was “mad about some things she had seen in
the media, and she wanted to set the facts right.” And she “couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been leaked already,” Solari said.
She also told agents they could find a screen shot on her cellphone of a news agen-
cy’s document drop site, prosecutors said.
Other sloppy moves for a leaker emerged in the investigation. The government contends she once ran a web query: “Do top secret computers detect when flash drives are inserted?” And she did just that on a top-se- cret computer while she was still in the Air Force, plugging in a flash drive to see what would happen, pros- ecutors said.
When she later mailed the Russia documents off, she sent them off locally, so they had an Augusta, Ga., postmark, prosecutors said, allowing investigators to further narrow down who might have printed off the sensitive report while in contact with the news outlet.
The agents let her call her parents.
“Basically, she got to tell me that she was in trouble,” her stepfather said. “She was being arrested, and that she would probably be detained. She was frightened and upset, but in
control — that’s how she is.” According to Solari, Winner also told her mother:
“Mom, those documents, I screwed up.”