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RELATED: Rosie O’Donnell makes the largest donation so far in support of alleged NSA leaker Reality Winner
The 25-year-old NSA contractor, who was a linguist for the U.S. Air Force and has been indicted by a federal grand jury for “willful retention and transmission of national defense information,” has pleaded not guilty to leaking classified information to a news outlet believed to be The Intercept.
“In the government’s criminal complaint against Winner, it says it was able to track her down as the leaker because The Intercept showed government officials a copy of the leaked document, which showed signs of having been folded,” NPR reported. “That led investigators to think the document had been printed out. They say […] that Winner had been in email contact with a news outlet, presumed to be The Intercept.”
Wow, Reality Winner leaked to the Intercept to try to persuade @ggreenwald to stop dismissing the Russia scandal https://t.co/oTfvcOSR7Q pic.twitter.com/lIaeh0rUDT
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) June 13, 2017
For someone facing up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines, Winner appears to be pretty relaxed.
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Video of Winner hanging out at Lincoln County Law Enforcement Center’s prison yard in Georgia and doing yoga has surfaced.
From the prison window to the wall she goes.
To say there are worries here, that could be a stretch.
Since her arrest, people have been digging into Winner’s possible motivations in leaking a document on alleged Russian attempts to hack voting machines.
We know that Winner followed Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks and Anonymous on social media and that she was not happy about a Donald Trump presidency.
“Well. People suck. #ElectionNight,” she tweeted on election night.
Vogue described her as “a former Bernie Sanders supporter who was outspokenly anti-Trump, referring to the president as a ‘piece of shit,’ using #nevermypresident,” this according to information posted on Winner’s Facebook page.
Due to of all of this, the mother of the accused leaker, Billie Winner-Davis, fears her daughter will not get a fair trial.
“My biggest fear in all of this is that she’s not going to get a fair trial,” she said in an interview on CNN with Anderson Cooper. “She’s going to be made an example of […] I’m terrified for her right now because of the news, the climate, the social media.”
“She was afraid she was going to disappear, that [the government was] going to make her disappear,” she added. “And she felt like she needed to give them what they were asking for at the time.”
Gary Davis, Winner’s stepdad, said the former Air Force linguist “served her country” that she “is a veteran” and “a patriot” who is being “maligned and slandered in the media.”
