Winner, who leaked report on Russian election interference, is first person Trump administration charged under Espionage Act

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The NSA contractor Reality Winner was sentenced on Thursday to five years and three months in prison for leaking a top-secret document about Russian interference in the US election.

Winner, 26, was sentenced at a federal court in Georgia after pleading guilty in June as part of a deal with government prosecutors.

She is the first person the Trump administration has charged under the Espionage Act for a document leak.

The justice department did not pursue the maximum sentence and instead recommended a 63-month penalty. Government attorneys said that would be the longest sentence ever for an unauthorized disclosure to the media.

Prosecutors said that in May 2017, Winner, who was working for the defense contractor Pluribus International Corporation, printed a classified document that showed how Russian military intelligence hacked at least one voting software supplier and had attempted to breach more than 100 local election systems in the days before the November 2016 vote.

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That document was the basis of a story published on the news site the Intercept about one hour before the justice department announced Winner’s arrest in June 2017.

In court on Thursday, Winner said she took responsibility for “an undeniable mistake that I made”.

Wearing an orange jumpsuit, Winner apologized for the leak and said: “My actions were a cruel betrayal of my nation’s trust in me.”



Winner has been jailed since her arrest and in June she pleaded guilty to one felony count of transmitting national security information, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment.

After the sentencing, the justice department said that Winner had abused her government job to reveal sources and intelligence gathering methods.

“This defendant used her position of trust to steal and divulge closely guarded intelligence information,” US attorney Bobby Christine said in a statement. “Her betrayal of the United States put at risk sources and methods of intelligence gathering, thereby offering advantage to our adversaries.”

Winner’s attorneys challenged the lengthy recommended sentence in a court filing last week. “Despite her singular criminal act, as set forth below, the stipulated sentence of 63 months is in excess of many prior Espionage Act cases where the government has prosecuted ‘leakers’ of national defense information, including cases where the factual conduct, and information leaked, was arguably worse,” attorneys wrote.

On Thursday, they struck a different tone. One of Winner’s attorneys, John Bell, told reporters her legal team was grateful the judge agreed to the recommended sentence. “It’s a serious matter and she can now get on with her life,” Bell said.

Free speech advocates have warned that the Trump administration’s use of the Espionage Act – instead of less harsh laws that are crafted to penalize people for leaking government information – in Winner’s case perpetuates the aggressive attacks on whistleblowers seen under Barack Obama’s administration.

The Intercept’s editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, said Winner “should be honored, not punished” in a statement after the sentencing.

“Selective and politically motivated prosecutions of leakers and whistleblowers under the Espionage Act – which dramatically escalated under Barack Obama, opening the door for the Trump justice department’s abuses – are an attack on the first amendment that will one day be judged harshly by history,” Reed said.

Reed said the Intercept had not known the source of the document, but learned about Winner’s arrest shortly after the story was published. She also said there were “shortcomings” in how the news site handled the document. Reed said: “However, it soon became clear that the government had at its disposal, and had aggressively used, multiple methods to quickly hunt down Winner.”