Reality Leigh Winner (born December 4, 1991) is a United States Air Force veteran, and a former National Security Agency (NSA) translator. In 2018, she was given the longest prison sentence ever imposed for an unauthorized release of government classified information to the media, after she leaked an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. She was sentenced to five years and three months in federal prison.
On June 3, 2017, while employed by the military contractor Pluribus International Corporation (de), Winner was arrested on suspicion of leaking an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections from the NSA to the news website The Intercept. The report indicated that Russian hackers accessed voter registration records in the United States with an email phishing operation.
The Intercept's mishandling of the material exposed her as the source and led to her arrest. Twice denied bail, Winner was held at the Lincoln County Jail in Lincolnton, Georgia. On August 23, 2018, Winner was convicted of espionage for "removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet" and sentenced to five years and three months in prison as part of a plea deal.
Reality Winner was incarcerated at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. On June 2, 2021, Winner was released to the San Antonio, Texas-based Residential Reentry Management center. In November 2021, she was released from federal custody.
Winner was born in Texas to Billie and Ronald Winner. Her father chose her unusual name. She grew up in Kingsville, Texas, and attended H. M. King High School, where she learned Latin at school, studied Arabic in her free time, and played on the soccer and tennis teams.
Her father's influence early in her life had extensively shaped Winner's worldview on many topics, including politics, history, philosophy, and religion. After the September 11 attacks, Winner had intense discussions with her father on geopolitics and Islam, and she decided to learn the Arabic language.
Winner served in the United States Air Force from 2010 to 2016, achieving the rank of senior airman (an E-4 paygrade) with the 94th Intelligence Squadron. After two years of language and intelligence training, she was posted to Fort Meade, Maryland. She worked as a linguist who spoke the Persian language as well as Dari and Pashto, the two official languages of Afghanistan. Assigned to the drone program, she listened in on intercepted foreign chatter to provide U.S. forces with intelligence. Winner was awarded the Air Force Commendation Medal for "aiding in 650 enemy captures, 600 enemies killed in action and identifying 900 high value targets."
A month after being honorably discharged from the Air Force in November 2016, Winner moved to Augusta, Georgia, where she taught at a CrossFit gym and a yoga studio. Winner applied for jobs with NGOs in Afghanistan, hoping to use her Pashto language skills with refugees. However, her search for overseas employment was frustrated by her lack of post-secondary education. Still possessing a top-secret security clearance, Winner was then hired by Pluribus International Corporation, a small firm that provides services under contract to the National Security Agency. On February 13, 2017, Pluribus assigned her to work at Fort Gordon, a U.S. Army post near Augusta, where she had once been stationed while in the Air Force.
Release of classified document
Assigned to translate foreign documents relating to Iran's aerospace program in Persian, Winner was employed by Pluribus International Corporation at the time of her arrest. Winner came across a single classified document which she subsequently anonymously mailed to The Intercept. Winner told CBS's 60 Minutes that she leaked the classified material because she thought Americans were being intentionally misled about Russia's active measures to influence the outcome of the 2016 United States presidential election.
When FBI agents arrived at her home on June 3, 2017, Winner did not insist on consulting a lawyer, and the FBI agents failed to inform her of her Miranda rights when Winner was arrested. When her house was searched and she was initially questioned, Winner stated that she was not "trying to be a Snowden or anything".
The Department of Justice announced her arrest on June 5. She was detained even before The Intercept published the article that was based upon the leaks. The Intercept report described Russian military attempts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election by hacking a U.S. voting software supplier and by sending spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before the November 8 election. The story was based upon a top secret May 5, 2017, National Security Agency (NSA) document leaked to them anonymously.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, called on the public to support Winner, offering a $10,000 reward for information about a reporter for The Intercept who had allegedly helped the U.S. government identify Winner as the leaker. Assange wrote on Twitter that "Winner is no Clapper or Petraeus with 'elite immunity'. She's a young woman against the wall for talking to the press."
The Intercept sent copies of the documents to the NSA on May 30 to confirm their veracity, and the NSA notified the FBI. According to Vice magazine, an FBI report said the documents "appeared to be folded and/or creased, suggesting they had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space." Through an internal audit, the NSA determined that Winner was one of six workers who had accessed the particular documents on its classified system, but only Winner's computer had been in contact with The Intercept using a personal email account. On June 3, the FBI obtained a warrant to search Winner's electronic devices, and she was subsequently arrested.
Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept's handling of the documents, which included publishing the documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker. In October 2020, The Intercept's co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald wrote that Winner had sent her documents to The Intercept's New York newsroom with no request that any specific journalist work on them. He called her exposure a "deeply embarrassing newsroom failure" resulting from "speed and recklessness," for which he was publicly blamed "despite having no role in it." He said editor-in-chief Betsy Reed "oversaw, edited, and controlled that story." An internal review conducted by The Intercept into its handling of the document provided by Winner found that its "practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves".
NSA whistleblower John Kiriakou and Guantanamo Bay detention camp whistleblower Joseph Hickman have also both accused Matthew Cole—the same reporter accused of revealing Winner's identity—of playing a role in their exposure, which, in Kiriakou's case, led to imprisonment.
Winner was charged with "removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet." On June 8, 2017, she pleaded not guilty to a charge of "willful retention and transmission of national defense information" and was denied bail. Prosecutors alleged she may have been involved in other leaks of classified information, and might try to flee the country if released. Justice Department lawyers also argued that her defense team should not be allowed to discuss any classified information, even if it was in news reports published by the media.
The U.S. magistrate judge who presided over Winner's bail hearing, Brian Epps, said, "She seems to have a fascination with the Middle East and Islamic terrorism," and quoted her writing: "It's a Christlike vision to have a fundamentalist Islamic state." Federal agents had found her diary during a search of her home, in which she allegedly expressed support for Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden, and for burning down the White House. However, one of the prosecutors at her bail hearing said, "The government is not in any way suggesting the defendant has become a jihadist or that she is a Taliban sympathizer."