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Old 08-23-2018, 09:10 AM
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Arrow Reality Winner, Former Air Force Linguist, Gets 63 Months for Leaking Report on Russi

Reality Winner, Former Air Force Linguist, Gets 63 Months for Leaking Report on Russian Hacking
By: Dave Phillips 8-23-18
RE: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/u...-sentence.html

Photo link: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018...y=90&auto=webp
Reality Winner is the first person to be sentenced under the Espionage Act since President Trump took office.CreditMichael Holahan/The Augusta Chronicle, via Associated Press

Reality Winner, the former Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor who pleaded guilty in June to leaking a top-secret government report on Russian hacking, was sentenced on Thursday to five years and three months in federal prison.

Ms. Winner, 26, received the longest sentence ever imposed for an unauthorized release of government information to the media. She is the first person to be sentenced under the Espionage Act since President Trump took office.

She was arrested in June 2017 and was held for more than a year while prosecutors built their case. She pleaded guilty in June 2018 to one felony count of unauthorized transmission of national defense information, for giving a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election to a news outlet.

Prosecutors said on Thursday that Ms. Winter’s actions merited a stiff sentence.

“Winner’s purposeful violation put our nation’s security at risk,” United States Attorney Bobby L. Christine told reporters after the sentencing in federal court in Augusta, Ga. He said the report she leaked revealed sources and methods of intelligence gathering, and its disclosure “caused exceptionally grave damage to U.S. national security.”

He added that she “knowingly and intentionally betrayed the trust of her colleagues and her country,” and was “the quintessential example of an insider threat.”

Ms. Winner was fresh out of the Air Force and just a few months into a job as a translator for the National Security Agency in May 2017 when prosecutors say she printed a report from her work computer that detailed hacking attacks by a Russian intelligence service against local election officials and voter registration databases. She later told investigators that she smuggled the printed report out of the offices of the contractor, Pluribus International in Augusta, Ga., in her pantyhose, and then mailed the report to the online news outlet The Intercept.

Following a trail of clues, the F.B.I. soon arrested Ms. Winner, but not before the Intercept published the classified report.

Addressing Chief Judge J. Randall Hall in court on Thursday, Ms. Winner said she took “full responsibility” for the “undeniable mistake I made.” She said she “would like to apologize profusely” for her actions.

Ms. Winner’s lawyers asked the judge to take into account in sentencing that she had been honorably discharged, had been a top student and had no prior criminal record. “She is someone who has done something she should not have done — and knows she should not have done,” John Bell, one of Ms. Winner’s lawyers, told Judge Hall. “But she’s not an evil person.”

Joe Whitley, a former federal prosecutor who was another of Ms. Winner’s lawyers, highlighted her service with the Air Force, including assisting with more than 800 intelligence missions that he said had “removed” 100 enemies.

Federal guidelines allowed for a sentence of up to 10 years, but prosecutors agreed in June to a sentence of 63 months, to avoid a trial that would require discussing classified reports and intelligence gathering techniques in open court. Prosecutors argued in a sentencing memorandum filed this week that such a trial “would compound the exceptionally grave harm to national security already caused by the defendant,” and that the plea agreement “reflects a fair resolution of the defendant’s criminal culpability. ”

The judge imposed the sentence that prosecutors recommended.

The Justice Department prosecuted Ms. Winner under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that made it a crime to disclose secrets that could be used to harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary.

Prosecutions under the law for leaking sensitive information to the news media, rather than to a foreign government, were once rare, and usually led to little if any prison time. But in recent years the Justice Department has been cracking down on such leaks.

Perhaps the best -known leaker, Chelsea Manning, was tried and convicted in a military court-martial, not a civilian court, for sending a vast archive of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but served only about seven years; President Obama commuted the remainder of her sentence.

In 2013, a former F.B.I. agent was sentenced to 43 months in prison for leaking classified information to The Associated Press about a foiled bomb plot in Yemen. That same year, a former C.I.A. agent, John Kiriakou was given a 30-month sentence for revealing the identity of an undercover agent. In 2015, another former C.I.A. agent, Jeffrey Sterling, was sentenced to 42-months for leaking classified information to The New York Times about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.
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