Posted on 06/09/2021 6:09:47 PM PDT by Steely Tom
I’m a news junkie. I tend to watch five hours of cable news programming just about every day. While viewing I also read, or at least scan, five to six newspapers a day thanks to the internet, mostly from the Northeast, but sometimes from across the country.
My addiction to news started decades ago, so of course I was familiar with the cases of famous whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning, Eric Snowden and – here’s a blast from the past – Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the infamous Pentagon Papers to newspapers back in 1971.
I also know the stories of several of the many whistle-blowers in the Trump administration. Some examples include Tricia Newbold, who worked at the White House Personnel Security Office and who told the House Oversight Committee that more than two dozen denials of security clearances for Trump appointees, including the former president’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, had been overturned by another Trump political appointee. And Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who had worked for the National Security Council and who testified before Congress about what he knew about Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a call that led to the second impeachment of the former president.
But somehow I had never heard of Reality Winner.
It wasn’t as if her case had never hit the news. Thanks to Google, I can now find articles written about the young woman from as early as 2017. Indeed, Stephen Colbert even did a six-minute monologue bit called “A Reality Check” about Winner back in June of that year. But I missed all of the widely scattered mentions of Winner. I guess there was simply too much news during the Trump campaign and presidency, so Winner’s story was drowned out.
Thanks to the Lighthouse International Film Festival’s screening of a documentary titled “United States vs. Reality Winner,” I now know her story.
Director Sonia Kennebeck’s film shows that Winner, an Air Force veteran, then 25, was employed by military contractor Pluribus International Corp. when she was arrested on June 3, 2017 for leaking an intelligence report that originated with the National Security Agency to the online publication The Intercept. The report had leaked days before the 2016 presidential election and showed that Russia had meddled in that election.
Now, the leaked document didn’t reveal sources and methods, so it didn’t put any American spies, Russian informants or cyber-intelligence programs in danger. And the American public definitely had the right to know about Russia’s actions. But the U.S. Department of Justice went after Winner in a big way. After being repeatedly denied bail and her defense lawyers not being allowed to employ any classified information in court even though it had been in news reports published by the media, she eventually pleaded guilty to breaking the federal Espionage Act and received a sentence of five years and three months, the longest sentence ever imposed on a civilian whistle-blower. (Manning had been originally sentenced to 35 years before Barack Obama’s commutation in 2017, but she, then a he, was an active member of the U.S. Army when found guilty in a military court-martial.)
What made Kennebeck’s documentary so interesting is that just three weeks before the film’s release date, the government released the audio recordings of Winner’s initial interrogation by FBI Special Agent Justin Garrick as almost a dozen associates were searching her home for evidence. The government had already released a written transcript of the interview/interrogation, so Kennebeck was forced to consider hiring a voice actor to re-create the scene. Now viewers got to hear the real thing.
There was pretty solid evidence that Winner had been responsible for the leak before the FBI’s visit. The Intercept, doing the responsible thing in attempting to confirm the validity of the document, made a big mistake in allegedly sharing a copy with the NSA, or at least a private security expert connected with the NSA to do so, not realizing the document had “printer tracking dots,” a high-tech watermark embedded in its text identifying the machine it was printed on and the time it was printed.
However, more than one person – six, in fact – had access to that printer. So how was the FBI confident the culprit was Winner? Garrick played the “good cop” game, telling Winner that she had a good Air Force record and wasn’t a bad person, but maybe had made a mistake. She finally admitted she had folded a copy of the report and stuck it in her pantyhose to remove the document that she eventually mailed to The Intercept.
Her defense attorneys, in part paid for by a regretful Intercept, argued that Winner had not been read her Miranda rights before her interrogation. That argument went nowhere – oftentimes a defendant has no argument about not being Mirandized until being officially placed under arrest.
The lesson to be learned by any defendant is clear: Do not talk to police, FBI agents, Department of Justice lawyers, anybody involved in a criminal investigation until you have an attorney present.
I thought just about any American knew that. How many TV shows have you seen cops tell suspects “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you do say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to consult an attorney and to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand these rights?”
How can somebody as intelligent as Winner not remember that? Well, when suspects have law enforcement officers searching their residence, as was the case with Winner, they start getting nervous and forget what they should have learned, even if only on television. Back in 1991 I read “Homicide, A Year on the Killing Streets” by Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, who went on to be a writer and producer of such TV shows as NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street” and HBO’s “The Corner” and “The Wire.” Early in the book a detective (or it may have been detectives – hey, it was 20 years ago!) told him if it weren’t for confessions, the settlement rate of homicides in Baltimore would have been even more pathetic than the city’s already low rate. The “good cop” style plays well with suspects.
Another interesting element of the Winner case is that she never should have seen the report in the first place. She is a Middle East and Afghanistani language linguist, fluent in Dari, Farsi and Pashto. So how did she end up with an NSA report on Russian interference? You can have a Top Secret clearance – this writer had one while serving in the Coast Guard in the 1970s – without also having “Need to Know” classification. Obviously security inside of Pluribus wasn’t tight.
It reminded me of a great 1985 movie, “The Falcon and the Snowman,” starring Timothy Hutton and and a young Sean Penn in a breakout role and based on a true story. Hutton played Christopher Boyce, the son of a former FBI special agent who was employed as a civilian defense contractor in California. Boyce received misrouted classified CIA cables that implicated the U.S. in interfering with Australian elections. That real experience made him distrustful of the government and turned him, along with his buddy Andrew Daulton Lee (Penn), a small-time drug dealer and addict, into Russian spies.
How many times can the government or its civilian contractors accidentally allow people to discover information they shouldn’t have had access to? Let’s put it this way: It happened to me when in the Coast Guard.
Finally, politics reared its ugly head during Winner’s experience.
Trump originally Tweeted, “Ex-NSA contractor to spend 63 months in jail over ‘classified’ information. Gee, this is ‘small potatoes’ compared with what Hillary Clinton did! So unfair Jeff (Sessions, Trump’s original attorney general), Double Standard.” However, he never pardoned or even commuted Winner’s sentence.
In fact, Winner is still a prisoner, held at the Federal Bureau of Prisons Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, where she was placed due to complications of bulimia. On April 24, 2020 a federal judge rejected her plea to commute her sentence and be released to home confinement, citing the COVID-19 epidemic. In July 2020 it was reported Winner had tested positive for COVID, leaving her with occasional shortness of breath for months. She apparently won’t be released until Nov. 23, 2021 and then will have to serve three years of probation.
Thanks to Kennebeck’s film, her story is now being publicized once again.
Here's a little more news about her. They're not going to give up on this.
Yahoo News (June 7, 2021): Reality Winner’s family hit out at Biden’s ‘radio silence’ after whistleblower ‘won him the election’
Washington Post (May 12, 2021): Reality Winner was the FBI’s ‘head on a pike’ for Trump. It’s time to set her free.
The Seattle Times: (May 14, 2021): It’s time to free the young American woman who was the FBI’s ‘head on a pike’ for Trump
"famous whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning"
The writer is admitting they are heavily programmed by the "Progressive" media.
Eeeeeewwww.
Great point.
Yup,I noticed that too.
Winner and Manning should have been marroned on desert island, as Roman emperors used to do.
Winner and Vindman “Oh say can you see” ?
No credibility.
These people aren’t whistleblowers, they are political hacks.
They should have followed the law, not political vendettas. I have no sympathy for government employees who play politics, especially in the NSA.
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