page_title: Reality Winner
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Reality Winner / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Reality Winner
context_page_description: Reality Leigh Winner is an American former intelligence specialist. In 2017, she was charged with "removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet". The material in question originated with the National Security Agency.
  On June 3, 2017, while employed by the military contractor Pluribus International Corporation, Winner was arrested on suspicion of leaking an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections to the news website The Intercept. The report suggested that Russian hackers accessed voter registration rolls in the U.S. with an email phishing operation, though it was unclear whether any changes had been made.
  Concerns were raised that The Intercept′'s sloppy handling of the material exposed her as the source and contributed to her arrest. Twice denied bail, Winner was held at the Lincoln County Jail in Lincolnton, Georgia. On August 23, 2018, Winner was sentenced to five years and three months in prison as part of a plea deal. As of May 2019, she is incarcerated at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Ft. Worth, Texas.
context_section_description: Winner served in the United States Air Force from 2010 to 2016, achieving the rank of senior airman (an E-4 paygrade) with the 94th Intelligence Squadron. After two years of language and intelligence training, she was posted to Fort Meade, Maryland. She worked as a cryptologic linguist, being fluent in the Persian language and in Dari, the Persian dialect spoken in Afghanistan, as well as in Pashto. Assigned to the drone program, she listened in on intercepted foreign chatter to provide U.S. forces with intelligence. Winner was awarded the Air Force Commendation Medal for "aiding in 650 enemy captures, 600 enemies killed in action and identifying 900 high[-]value targets."
  A month after being honorably discharged from the Air Force in November 2016, Winner moved to Augusta, Georgia, where she taught at CrossFit and at a yoga studio. Winner applied for jobs with NGOs in Afghanistan, hoping to use her Pashto to dialogue with refugees. However, her search for overseas employment was frustrated by her lack of post-secondary education. Still possessing a top-secret security clearance, Winner was then hired by Pluribus International Corporation, a small firm that provides services under contract to the National Security Agency. On February 13, 2017, Pluribus assigned her to work at Fort Gordon, a U.S. Army post near Augusta, where she had once been stationed while in the Air Force. Assigned to translate documents relating to Iran's aerospace program from Persian, Winner was employed by Pluribus at the time of her arrest for unauthorized disclosure of classified documents. It was while translating these documents that Winner came across the classified document she ended up mailing to The Intercept.
  Federal agents found her diary during a search of her home, in which she allegedly expressed support for Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden. The U.S. magistrate judge who presided over Winner's bail hearing said: "She seems to have a fascination with the Middle East and Islamic terrorism," and quoted her writing: "It's a Christlike vision to have a fundamentalist Islamic state." However, one of the prosecutors at her bail hearing said: "The government is not in any way suggesting the defendant has become a jihadist or that she is a Taliban sympathizer."
caption: Winner in 2010
exif: {}