She’s never denied what she did. She’s never claimed what she did wasn’t wrong. She’s never claimed someone else made her do it. She admitted what she did wrong immediately and accepted a plea deal.
Now that she sees just how harsh prison life is, she’s asking for clemency. I don’t see anything wrong with making the request and it absolutely does nothing to diminish her taking responsibility. And again, I ask if you can find a single other case where the DOJ decided an individual doing what she did required that severe of a punishment.
She and other leakers need to be punished to deter that activity. However, the DOJ has been wildly inconsistent at best and in this case seems to have no reason to push this hard against a naive and foolish girl beyond “we can, and screw her”. That isn’t how the DOJ is supposed to work. A couple years in prison, permanent loss of any security clearance, total career destruction, and the permanent label of convicted felon should be plenty of penance for her sins. She was a foolish girl who made stupid choices. She’s not some deep cover agent for a foreign government looking for missile codes. If she were, the DOJ (based on historical evidence) would have pushed for a couple years in prison. Instead, she gets two and a half times that for leaking a report about suspected election interference? Crazy.
She accepted a plea deal of five years. That was her decision. General Flynn has gone through more crap than she has for a longer period of time, for doing nothing wrong at all, and lost far more than Reality Winner did. She got off easy.