Reality Winner, a former government contractor who pleaded guilty to mailing a classified U.S. report to a news organization, was sentenced on Thursday to more than five years in jail. Bobby Christine, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia, said her “purposeful violation put our nation's security at risk."
Read More: Reality Winner, Former N.S.A. Translator, Gets More Than 5 Years in Leak of Russian Hacking Report (NYT)
Ms. Winner, 26, is the first person to be sentenced under the Espionage Act since President Trump took office. Prosecutors said her sentence was the longest ever imposed in federal court for an unauthorized release of government information to the media.
She was arrested in June 2017 and was held for more than a year while prosecutors built a case. She pleaded guilty in June 2018 to one felony count of unauthorized transmission of national defense information, for giving a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election to a news outlet.
Prosecutors said on Thursday that Ms. Winter’s actions merited a stiff sentence.
“Winner’s purposeful violation put our nation’s security at risk,” United States Attorney Bobby L. Christine told reporters after the sentencing in federal court in Augusta, Ga.
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Ms. Winner was fresh out of the Air Force and a few months into a job as a translator for the National Security Agency in May 2017 when prosecutors say she printed a report from her work computer that detailed hacking attacks by a Russian intelligence service against local election officials and voter registration databases. She later told investigators that she smuggled the report out of the Augusta, Ga., offices of the contractor, Pluribus International, in her pantyhose, and then mailed it to the online news outlet The Intercept.
Following a trail of clues, the F.B.I. soon arrested Ms. Winner two days before the Intercept published the classified report.
Addressing Chief Judge J. Randall Hall in court on Thursday, Ms. Winner said she took “full responsibility” for the “undeniable mistake I made.” She said she “would like to apologize profusely” for her actions.