Reality L. Winner, a former National Security Agency contractor who was the first person prosecuted during the Trump administration on charges of leaking classified information, was released in a halfway house, her attorney announced Monday.
Me. Winner’s sentence of more than five years has been shortened due to good behavior, although the government will limit her public comments.
She was released from the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, a prison in Fort Worth, Texas. She will spend the next six months in a half-house, where she will have access to the outdoors and meet with her family, and then be supervised, her attorney, Alison Grinter Allen, said in an interview.
Ms Winner was held under difficult circumstances. The prison lost power and heat during last winter’s ice storms in Texas, and a number of fellow inmates were killed by Covid-19. Her communication has been closely monitored and the government has so far refused to move her to a less secure facility, Ms. Allen said.
“It was a terrible, terrible time,” she said. Allen said. “Not that there’s a great time in prison.”
A former linguist of the Air Force, Mrs. Winner, pleaded guilty in 2018 after being prosecuted for leaking classified information. She was arrested in 2017 and charged with sending a classified report on election interference to reporters at The Intercept.
The report describes hacks by Russian intelligence agents against local election officials and a company that sold software related to voter registration.
While me. Winner starts to make a waiver or commute, is Mrs. Allen added to her legal team because her other lawyers were banned from speaking in public about the case.
Me. Winner apologized to President Donald J. Trump, with her legal team submitting thousands of letters in an attempt to get him to intervene in her case. Mr. Trump never acted.
After being released from the halfway house, she will still not be able to talk about any documents she checked while working at the National Security Agency, but she can talk in detail about issues that concern her.
“It would surprise me if advocacy and activism are not a part of her life in the future,” she said. Allen said, ‘whether it’s about the circumstances and the state of mass incarceration, political persecution or electoral integrity.
