Reality Winner,<\/u> the most prominent and harshly punished whistleblower of the Trump era, has been released to a halfway house after serving most of her five-year sentence for leaking a classified document on Russia’s effort to hack the 2016 U.S. presidential election.<\/p>\n
Court filings make clear that Winner had\u00a0wanted to make Americans aware<\/a> that the government had concluded<\/a> that Russia secretly tried to\u00a0gain access to U.S. voting systems in 2016, contrary to what the Trump administration said in 2017. Winner was a contractor for the National Security Agency when she disclosed the document, which was\u00a0published by The Intercept<\/a> in June 2017. The NSA document described phishing attempts by Russian military intelligence against local U.S. election officials \u2014 and was the most convincing evidence to emerge of the Russian effort.<\/p>\n Winner was prosecuted under the Espionage Act, even though election officials in the U.S.\u00a0indicated that\u00a0it was her action<\/a>,\u00a0rather than warnings from their own government, that had made them aware they were targets of Russian hackers. While the Obama administration had used the draconian Espionage Act against a record number of leakers, none received a sentence as long as Winner\u2019s, who pled guilty rather than face what could have been an even longer sentence if she had gone to trial.<\/p>\n The injustice of\u00a0her case was highlighted when Marina Butina, a Russian national, received an 18-month sentence in 2018 for trying to influence American political figures without registering as a foreign agent. It struck many observers as dumbfounding that an actual Russian agent would receive a lighter jail sentence than an American trying to reveal a secret Russian effort to alter the outcome of an election. Winner was even denied compassionate release\u00a0during\u00a0the Covid-19 pandemic \u2014 and subsequently contracted<\/a> the disease.<\/p>\n