Accused NSA leaker pleads guilty in deal
Reality L. Winner was the first person prosecuted by the Trump administration on charges of leaking classified information.
Reality L. Winner, a former Air Force linguist who was the first person prosecuted by the Trump administration on charges of leaking classified information, pleaded guilty Tuesday as part of an agreement with prosecutors that calls for a sentence of 63 months in prison.
Winner, who entered her plea in U.S. District Court in Augusta, Georgia, was arrested last June and accused of sharing a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election with the news media.
Winner, who is now 26, has been jailed since her arrest and wore an orange prison jumpsuit and white sneakers to the hearing. Her decision to plead guilty to one felony count allows the government both to avoid a complex trial that had been scheduled for October and to notch a victory in the Trump administration’s aggressive pursuit of leakers.
“All of my actions I did willfully, meaning I did so of my own free will,” Winner told Chief Judge J. Randal Hall on Tuesday. Throughout the hearing, Winner kept her hands behind her back while she answered questions about whether she understood the terms of the plea deal.
Winner, who was honorably discharged from the Air Force in 2016, was working as a contractor for the National Security Agency when she obtained a copy of a report that described hacks by a Russian intelligence service against local election officials and a company that sold software related to voter registration.
The Intercept, an online news outlet that a prosecutor said Winner admired, published a copy of the top secret report shortly before Winner’s arrest was made public. The report described two cyberattacks by Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU — one in August against a company that sells voter registration-related software and another, a few days before the election, against 122 local election officials.
The Justice Department prosecuted Winner under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that criminalizes the unauthorized disclosure of national security secrets that could be used to harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary.
Winner’s prosecution galvanized transparency advocates, who mounted a publicity campaign in her support that even included a billboard in Augusta, the east Georgia city where Winner lived at the time of her arrest. They were particularly infuriated by a judge’s ruling that she be held until her trial.
“They’re just coming down on her so tough,” Billie Winner-Davis, Winner’s mother, said in an interview after Tuesday’s plea hearing was scheduled. “I can only think that it’s because she was the very first one: the one they wanted to make an example out of ...”
Still, Winner-Davis said of her daughter’s willingness to plead guilty, “She wouldn’t have made this decision if she wasn’t ready to accept the consequences and to accept responsibility.”
Winner is the second person known to have reached a plea agreement with the Trump administration to resolve a leak prosecution. Terry J. Albury, a former FBI agent, pleaded guilty in April, but prosecutors in that case have signaled that they will ask that he serve 46 to 57 months in prison.
A judge must still decide whether to approve Winner’s sentence after reviewing a report that prosecutors will present. But prosecutors’ recommendation of more than five years in prison — followed by three years of supervised release — was unusually harsh for a leak case.