Reality Winner, the intelligence contractor who leaked to The Intercept and was quickly caught in June 2017 thanks to microdot printing , was sentenced to 63 months in prison on Thursday.

She had pleaded guilty on June 21 to a single count of unlawful retention and transmission of national defense information.

The information that Winner provided to The Intercept resulted in this June 5, 2017 news story: "Top-Secret NSA Report details Russian hacking effort days before 2016 election."

Winner had been a contractor for Pluribus International Corporation, a company that provides analytical, translation, and cyberwarfare development services to the intelligence community. A veteran of the Air Force, Winner held a TOP SECRET//SCI security clearance.

In a statement, The Intercept said that its story "played a crucial role in alerting local election officials who had been in the dark about the cyberattack—a public service that was implicitly acknowledged in a recent report from the Senate Intelligence Committee."

Winner’s lawyers characterized her not as someone who was a foreign spy, instead they noted in a sentencing memorandum: "Reality was a dedicated public servant and veteran who made a poor decision on this one occasion and she has taken full responsibility for that unfortunate decision."