https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/us/reality-winner-nsa-leak-guilty-plea.html?login=facebook
Why was the NSA keeping the fact that Russia was waging cyber war on our voting system secret?
By Charlie Savage and Alan Blinder
June 26, 2018
Reality L. Winner, a former Air Force linguist who was the first person prosecuted by the Trump administration on charges of leaking classified information, pleaded guilty on Tuesday as part of an agreement with prosecutors that calls for a sentence of 63 months in prison.
Ms. Winner, who entered her plea in Federal District Court in Augusta, Ga., was arrested last June and accused of sharing a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election with the news media.
Ms. Winner, who was honorably discharged from the Air Force in 2016, was working as a contractor for the National Security Agency when she obtained a copy of a report that described hacks by a Russian intelligence service against local election officials and a company that sold software related to voter registration.
The Intercept, an online news outlet that a prosecutor said Ms. Winner admired, published a copy of the top secret report shortly before Ms. Winner’s arrest was made public. The report described two cyberattacks by Russia’s military intelligence unit, the G.R.U. — one in August against a company that sells voter-registration-related software and another, a few days before the election, against 122 local election officials.
At a detention hearing last year, the prosecutor, Jennifer G. Solari, said that Ms. Winner had been “mad about some things she had seen in the media, and she wanted to set the facts right.”
•••••
The Justice Department prosecuted Ms. Winner under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that criminalizes the unauthorized disclosure of national-security secrets that could be used to harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary.
[I would say it was the NSA that was harming the U.S., and aiding a foreign adversary by keeping this information secret.]
•••••
prosecutors’ recommendation of more than five years in prison — followed by three years of supervised release — was unusually harsh for a leak case.
For most of American history, people accused of leaking to the news media were not prosecuted at all. In the flurry of cases that have arisen during the 21st century, most convicted defendants were sentenced to one to three and a half years.
•••••
Defendants facing such charges are not permitted to argue to jurors that they should vote to acquit because the disclosure was in the public interest.
•••••
No comments:
Post a Comment