Former National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner on Thursday was sentenced to more than five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking a classified report with information on Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election.
Winner, 26, was sentenced to 63 months, with no fine in a Georgia courtroom. She received an additional three years of supervised release.
The prisoner's mom had tears streaming down her face as the sentence was read. Winner appeared in court wearing an orange jumpsuit.
Winner's defense team said they felt the sentence, reportedly the longest ever imposed for a federal media leak crime, was "fair."
Winner, an Air Force veteran, pleaded guilty in June after being held in prison at the Lincoln County Jail near Augusta, Georgia. Winner was locked away
Maw! They're comin' to get me, Maw!
in June 2017, and charged under the Espionage Act for removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet, according to the Justice Department.
Winner’s 2017 arrest was announced shortly after the Intercept website published a story detailing how Russian hackers attacked at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent so-called "spear-phishing" emails to more than 100 local election officials at the end of October or beginning of November 2016. |