Posted on 06/08/2017 7:41:44 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
“I’m terrified, I’m terrified that she’s not going to be treated fairly,” the mother of accused leaker Reality Sara Winner told CBS News after her daughter’s arrest under the Espionage Act for stealing Top Secret documents and passing them along to a media outlet. Billie-Jean Davis says her daughter is afraid that law enforcement will “make her disappear,” but then at the same time claims that the US government wants to make an example of Winner. “That’s not fair,” she tells CBS:
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
The mother and stepfather of 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, the NSA contractor accused of leaking government secrets, are speaking out about their daughter. The Air Force veteran has been in federal custody since Saturday and faces up to 10 years in prison for allegedly passing a classified document to a news outlet.
Winner’s family says she’s not a traitor. …
“Her words to me were that she was really scared that they would make her disappear,” Davis said. …
“I’m terrified. I’m terrified that she’s not going to be treated fairly and that they’re going to try to make an example of her and that’s not fair. Sorry,” Davis said, crying.
No one wants to denigrate the Davises, who are clearly in pain for their daughter, and who are trying to demonstrate loyalty to her in a crisis, but most of this is sheer nonsense. The US does not “disappear” criminals; that’s something that regimes like Iran do on a regular basis. Perhaps Winner should have kept that in mind when pledging her own loyalty to Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif on Twitter. Her stepfather claims in this interview that Winner’s a “patriot,” but pledging support to a regime that regularly declares “death to America” and exposing top-secret material to serve one’s own petty political passions are not the acts of patriots.
So now she’s “frightened” and “really scared,” which pretty much describes anyone after getting caught committing a felony. The charges she faces are not “an insult to her and her service,” as her stepfather declares — they are a legitimate consequence of breaking the law. Anyone with a security clearance gets briefed ad nauseam on the consequences for violating the laws and regulations for handling classified material, and those warnings escalate as the clearance level goes up. A person with a Top Secret clearance will have not just been repeatedly warned about the potential for prosecution for violating the Espionage Act, they will undoubtedly have been briefed on recent prosecutions for such violations, as was common when I held a lower clearance in the mid-1980s. Winner was not some clerical stooge who had no concept of 18 USC 793 and its implications.
As for making an example of Winner, that’s precisely what the government needs to do, especially in this instance. There may be times when a whistleblower needs to go outside the chain of command with classified information to expose a specific instance of government wrongdoing, but Congress is still a much more legitimate option than the media. Even if that is true in principle, that has nothing to do with what Winner did. She wasn’t exposing government wrongdoing after trying to raise red flags internally — she exposed Top Secret information to satisfy her own sense of outrage over the results of an election. If Winner goes unpunished for that, we’ll have a deluge of leaks for similar reasons in every administration from here on out, and every president will serve at the whim of 25-year-old extremists in the intelligence agencies or their contractors. That’s not just untenable, it’s undemocratic — and at its core, un-American.
If the Reality Winners of the world think that it’s unfair to get prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act, then there’s a very good way to avoid being made an example: don’t break the law. And if you do, don’t expect the rest of us to feel much sympathy for your fright, your plight, or your take on the general unfairness of life.
Well, the Clintons and Obama aren't in charge any more, so those things won't be happening as they did before.
reporters
The right side of things is pretty good on not disappearing people. With that said times are a changing and she may rightly have concerns from all angles. Treason must be disappeared.
Time for the parents, too.
Anyone wanna know how this snowflake became such an a** hole?
only if she flushes herself down the toilet , oh wait
I think that the government has a public document listing all those in Gitmo. Not to worry, Mom.
rofl, that is nuts, Manning got out when we have a traitorous weasel in the White House.
I guess Ms. Reality Loser doesn’t quite grasp that the game has changed. No pardon or commutation for her!
p.s. What an ass she is, expecting her mama to have to do her dirty work with the MSM.
Yeah, not a good thing to be "fuzzy on the details" on.
Orange is the new black, ahe will get to do the lesbian show for real.
Quite so.
Hillary is not president Reality Winner!
Ten years is the max on the one single charge.
A thumb-drive comment came up, and she appears to have had a thumb-drive during her AF period, and downloaded classified documents (plural). They can’t find this thumb-drive and so, they are going back through log-files and trying to figure out the files downloaded.
I’m taking a guess that there’s dozens, if not hundreds. So you can figure a year minimum for each one of those. She could be looking at 20 to 30 years easily. Once the prosecutor lays out the additional charges...she’ll break down because there’s no chance of getting anything out of her youth...she’ll be a minimum of fifty before she gets out.
A black site would be fine by me.
She absolutely is a traitor and she and her parents will do better to realize, it was Barack Obama who let Freak Manning off. We now have law and order again.
“She’ll disappear into a fold of fat on her first prison wife.”
If Hillary is lucky, they’ll be sharing a cell and the warden can handle the nuptials. They can live happily ever after, or for 10 years, whichever comes first.
” she’s “frightened” and “really scared,”
I’ve seen Leavenworth. She has reason to be frightened and scared.
Guess she should have thought it through before she jumped.
Public hanging for treason beats disappearing.
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