NSA worker pleads guilty to leaking information
WASHINGTON — Reality 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 more than five years in prison.
Winner, who entered her plea in U.S. District Court in Augusta, Ga., was arrested last June and accused of sharing a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election with the news media.
Winner, 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.
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.
At a detention hearing last year, prosecutor Jennifer Solari said that Winner had been “mad about some things she had seen in the media and she wanted to set the facts right.”
The Justice Department prosecuted Winner under the Espionage Act.
Winner is the second person known to have reached a plea agreement with the Trump administration to resolve a leak prosecution. Terry Albury, a former FBI agent, pleaded guilty in April.
The Justice Department has brought at least two other leakrelated cases under the Trump administration.