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Reality Leigh Winner IDIOT |
A federal contractor was arrested over the weekend and accused of
leaking a classified report containing "Top Secret level" information on
Russian hacking efforts during the 2016 presidential election.
Reality Leigh Winner, 25, appeared in U.S. District
Court in Augusta, Ga., to face one charge of removing classified
material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet,
the Justice Department said Monday.
Winner's 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.
The Justice Department did not specify that Winner
was being charged in connection with the Intercept's report. However,
the site noted that the National Security Agency (NSA) report cited in
its story was dated May 5 of this year. An affidavit supporting Winner's
arrest also said that the report was dated "on or about" May 5.
The Intercept contacted the NSA and the national
intelligence director's office about the document and both agencies
asked that it not be published. U.S. intelligence officials then asked
The Intercept to redact certain sections. The Intercept said some
material was withheld at U.S. intelligence agencies' request because it
wasn't "clearly in the public interest."
The report said Russian military intelligence
"executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in
August 2016 evidently to obtain information on elections-related
software and hardware solutions, according to information that became
available in April 2017."
The hackers are believed to have then used data from
that operation to create a new email account to launch a spear-phishing
campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations, the document
said. "Lastly, the actors send test emails to two non-existent accounts
ostensibly associated with absentee balloting, presumably with the
purpose of creating those accounts to mimic legitimate services."
The document did not name any state.
The information in the leaked document seems to go
further than the U.S. intelligence agencies' January assessment of the
hacking that occurred.
The Washington Examiner reported
that Winner worked for Pluribus International Corporation and was
assigned to a U.S. government facility in Georgia. She had held a
top-secret classified security clearance since being hired this past
February. The affidavit sworn by FBI agent Justin Garrick said that she
had previously served in the Air Force and held a top-secret security
clearance.
Late Monday, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange tweeted his support for Winner.inner's attorney, Titus Thomas Nichols, declined to confirm whether
she is accused of leaking the NSA report received by The Intercept. He
also declined to name the federal agency for which Winner worked.
"My client has no (criminal) history, so it's not as
if she has a pattern of having done anything like this before," Nichols
told the Associated Press in a phone interview Monday. "She is a very
good person. All this craziness has happened all of a sudden."
Garrick said in his affidavit that the government was
notified of the leaked report by the news outlet that received it. He
said the agency that housed the report determined only six employees had
made physical copies. Winner was one of them. Garrick said
investigators found Winner had exchanged email with the news outlet
using her work computer.
Garrick's affidavit said he interviewed Winner at her
home Saturday and she "admitted intentionally identifying and printing
the classified intelligence reporting at issue" and mailing it to the
news outlet.
Asked if Winner had confessed, Nichols said, "If there is a confession, the government has not shown it to me."
House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Jason
Chaffetz, R-Utah, praised the arrest in an appearance on Fox News' "The
Story with Martha MacCallum."
"When you have classified information, you cannot put
that out there just because you think it would be a good idea,"
Chaffetz said. "I want people in handcuffs and I want to see people
behind bars."
Chaffetz also criticized federal agencies for failing to protect sensitive information after a series of high-profile leaks.
"They have hundreds of thousands of people that have
security clearances," Chaffetz said. "There are supposed to be
safeguards in there ... But how many times do we have to see this story
happen? They obviously don’t have the safeguards."