The Story of Reality Winner
Dec 22, 2023

With the revelation that the US Government is looking for yet more classfied documents which 'disappeared' when former President Donald Trump left office, and with his documents trial looming ever larger, we thought it would be apposite to look back at the case of Reality Winner, who leaked ONE document and paid the price. A price Trump has yet to even challenge in court.

Relity Winner was a former intelligence contractor who was imprisoned for leaking a report about Russian interference in the US presidential election that Donald Trump won in 2016 has insisted she acted out of love for a nation that was “being lied to”.

“I am not a traitor – I am not a spy,” Reality Winner said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS’ 60 Minutes. “I am somebody who only acted out of love for what this country stands for.”

In some of her most extensive remarks about her case since she was freed from prison last year for good behavior, Winner portrayed herself living as normal a life as possible in Texas, teaching yoga and fitness while also being a pet owner, daughter and sister named after a pun of her family’s surname and her father’s wish to have a “real winner”.

The 30-year-old also gave perhaps the most detailed account yet about the day she decided to leave her National Security Agency contractor’s office at the Fort Gordon army base in Georgia with an intelligence report about Russian attempts to meddle in the election that saw Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the White House.

Working for NSA contractor Pluribus International Corporation, Winner printed the document – labeled “TOP SECRET” – that explained how Russian military intelligence officials hacked at least one supplier of voting software and tried to break into more than 100 local election systems before the polls closed in 2016.

She tucked the report into the pantyhose underneath her dress and walked out of her office at the Fort Gordon army base in Georgia before the document became the basis of an article published on the Intercept news site.

Federal authorities announced that Winner had been arrested about an hour after that article came out. The Trump administration had her charged under the Espionage Act, which was initially created during the first world war as a means to punish people spying on the US during times of foreign conflict.

Winner pleaded guilty as part of a deal with prosecutors that called for her to be sentenced to five years in prison beginning in 2018. Authorities said the sentence was the longest ever handed down by a US federal court to someone convicted of providing government information to the media without permission.