In August 2018, 26-year-old Reality Winner, a decorated Air Force veteran, was sentenced to 63 months in prison on charges brought against her by the Trump Administration under a 1917 law, the Espionage Act.
As its name suggests, the World-War-One-era Espionage Act was created to punish spies, not whistleblowers and leakers. In more than 100 years, Winner was only the eighth person ever sentenced under the act.
Because she confessed early and because the charges against her—willful retention and transmission of national defense information—were related to “national security,” it was difficult for her geographically separated defense lawyers (who had to meet in a SCIF to discuss evidence) to mount an effective defense.
Facing a possible 10 years in prison, Winner took a plea deal.
She is currently serving her five-year-and-three-month-sentence in a maximum security prison in Forth Worth, Texas.
“The longest sentence ever for a leak prosecution.”
In a January 2020 episode of the “Why Is This Happening?” podcast, journalist Kerry Howley told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes this about Reality Winner: “She’s a vegan, she’s a social justice activist. She is a gun rights supporter. She’s just one of these millennials who crosses lines, right? She doesn’t fit easily into any particular box.”
Howley also told Hayes about Reality Winner’s quirky sense of humor: “She’s hilarious in her FBI interrogation. Her Facebook messages, which were brought up in court with her sister are very funny.”
The transcript of her FBI interrogation also reveals just how into guns she was—readily telling agents she had a (pink) AR-15, a Glock Nine, and “a-uhm-a 15 gauge” in her house.
The full transcript of Reality Winner’s interrogation is available online.
As Amanda Hess wrote in The New York Times in 2018:
The transcript itself was a crucial artifact in the legal proceedings. Her defense argued that the transcript, and its apparent confession, ought to be barred from court, as the F.B.I. never read Ms. Winner her Miranda Rights or told her she was free to leave her home…. the government argued that the transcript proved that the agents had been so “exceedingly friendly” to Ms. Winner that she could not have been forced into talking.
But, as the theater director Tina Satter, who staged the transcript as a play told the Times: “There was so much happening right underneath the surface of the language.” As Hess wrote, staging the play gave Satter a way to reveal the interrogation’s “hidden power dynamics.”
The government got away with arguing that Reality Winner didn’t need to be read her Miranda Rights because her conversations with the F.B.I. were so “friendly.” But in court, as Kerry Howley told Chris Hayes, the government also weaponized Winner’s friendly banter—including text exchanges with her sister Brittany—against her:
She’ll message her sister, “I have to take a polygraph where they’re going to ask if I plotted against the government #goingtofail.” And then her sister will be like, “Lol, just convince yourself you're writing a novel.” And then she’ll be like, “Look, I only say I hate America three times a day. I’m no radical.” And the prosecution will be like, “She says she hates America three times a day.” Right?
Her online history didn’t help her in court. Meanwhile, her given name didn’t help her in the court of public opinion.
She’s called Reality Winner. Like, really?
By the time Kerry Howley joined Chris Hayes on his January 2020 podcast, Reality Winner had just celebrated her third birthday in prison.
Sixteen months later, she is still there. Her request for a compassionate release during the pandemic was denied. Along the way, she and many of her fellow inmates were infected with Covid-19.
One thing Hayes and Howley touched upon briefly is how much Reality Winner’s name may have hurt her chances of getting treated like other “popular hero” whistleblowers:
CHRIS HAYES: Let’s go back. I mean, the first thing when I heard about this story, and this is a dumb surface thing, but her name. The first thought was like, ‘Who is the kind of person who’s named Reality and to which household does a baby come that then gets named Reality?’
KERRY HOWLEY: I think that has actually been a problem for raising awareness of Reality’s case and the analysis does tend to stop there. Like, really? In this age in which everything seems so absurd we're going to add the name Reality Winner to the pile?
Another thing that didn’t help Reality Winner was her faith in the Edward Snowden-loving website The Intercept.
Turned in by The Intercept
At the time Reality Winner turned over a single document to The Intercept, she was keenly aware that there was a growing pushback against the evidence of Russia’s 2016 election interference. Not just from Trump and Fox News, but also, as Chris Hayes said in his podcast, from “prominent editorial voices,” with The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, “chief among them.”
Winner, who listened to The Intercept podcast, actually requested a transcript of one episode in which someone states: “Literally there’s no hard evidence that the Russians have attempted to interfere in our election.”
But when she gave The Intercept the hard evidence, instead of protecting their source, they took the document, with all its revealing metadata, straight to the F.B.I..
The story wasn’t published immediately. But as soon as it was, F.B.I. agents were at Reality Winner’s door. As Reality’s mother Billie Winner-Davis told the New York Times in September 2020: “They sold her out, and they messed it up so that she would get caught…. The best years of her life are being spent in a system where she doesn’t belong.”
Will Biden deliver #Clemency4Reality?
On Twitter, Reality Winner’s mother (@bjwinnerdavis) and sister Brittany (@winnerbrittany) have continued to push for Reality’s release. In December 2020, Winner’s request for compassionate release was denied on appeal.
But the campaign to #FreeRealityWinner continues and the push for #Clemency4Reality got a new boost this week with a column by Margaret Sullivan in The Washington Post.
Sullivan points out that other leakers have received far less harsh punishments for far worse crimes than Reality Winner’s. Case in point:
David Petraeus, the former CIA director who disclosed reams of classified information to his biographer and former lover Paula Broadwell and later lied to investigators about it. In 2015, he was punished only with probation and a fine.
Sullivan makes clear that, in the early days of the Trump Presidency, Reality Winner—an unknown NSA contractor with a not-so-serious-sounding name—was an easy way for James Comey to make good on his promise to Trump to find and punish leakers. As Comey wrote in a February 2017 memo: “I said I was eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message… I said something about the value of putting a head on a pike.”
Sullivan’s article was prompted by “United States vs. Reality Winner,” which premiered at SXSW 2021. Sullivan calls it “a heartbreaking — and infuriating — new documentary… (that) reinforced my long-held belief that, although her prison term is due to end in November, it’s high time for our government to set Winner free.”
While the documentary has yet to find a distributor, you can read Variety’s review here and see a bonus scene here.
To get a sense of what Reality Winner’s mother Billie and stepfather Gary Davis have gone through—and their thoughts on Reality’s case and her treatment by the U.S. government—you can also watch their recent interview with the film’s director Sonia Kennebeck and producer Ines Hofmann Kanna on Vimeo.
Stand With Reality
Reality Winner is due to be released in November 2021. But as Billie Winner Davis points out, she still has to endure three years of “supervised release” after that.
Seemingly, Reality Winner’s only motivation in releasing evidence of Russia’s hacking in 2016 was to correct disinformation being shared by Trump, Fox News and others, including The Intercept podcast to which she listened.
As Pen America said in a 2018 statement: “Confidential government sources have always served as a vital resource for journalists reporting on national security, and brought to light many major stories… disclosures of even classified information to the press can play a vital role in advancing accountability and in furthering the public’s ability to make informed evaluations of governmental policies. Without disclosures by federal employees and contractors, we may never have learned about the government’s use of torture, unlawful mass surveillance, wasteful spending, and much more.”
Pen America also noted that by prosecuting Reality Winner under the Espionage Act, the Trump Administration effectively removed her right to argue that the document she leaked was in the public interest.
In a country where Harvey Weinstein was able to disable his ankle bracelet 57 times and Paul Manafort and Roger Stone both got pardons, the fact that Reality Winner has been incarcerated since she was first arrested on June 3, 2017 seems like a gross miscarriage of justice, especially since her only “crime” was to reveal to the American people a truth Robert Mueller later disclosed, seemingly with no risk to national security, within a criminal indictment.
For more information about Reality Winner and her case—and to sign the #Clemency4Reality petition—go to: www.standwithreality.org.
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