- She is charged with ‘willful retention and transmission of defense information’
- The 25-year-old was indicted by a federal grand jury and a judge ordered her to be detained until her trial
- Winner faces up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines if she’s found guilty
- Indictment states she worked with top-secret clearance at government agency
- Government claims they found handwritten notes at Winner’s home which appeared to sympathize with Osama bin Laden and other terrorists
- In one note, Winner allegedly wrote: ‘I want to burn the White House down and go live in Kurdistan’
Reality Winner portrayed little emotion in court Thursday as she was denied bond in her federal espionage case after the government alleged that she may have stolen other top secret information and poses an ongoing risk to national security.
The Air Force veteran, 25, is accused of mailing a classified report on a Russian military intelligence cyber-attack in 2016 to a news website.
She entered a plea of not guilty before Judge Brian K. Epps at U.S. District Court in downtown Augusta, Georgia on Thursday afternoon after she was charged with a single count of ‘willful retention and transmission of national defense information’.
Winner was brought into court, in an orange jumpsuit with her hair braided in a top knot, by two federal marshalls. Her hands were cuffed behind her back and she appeared to stand to attention when addressed by the judge.
She spoke only to respond: ‘Yes, your honor’ in a soft voice.
The prosecution made its case for Winner to be detained based on evidence that one prosecutor called ‘downright frightening’.
The prosecution alleged that Winner is ‘extremely intelligent’ and may have removed information from a ‘Top Secret computer on a USB drive’ while she was on active duty and stated that the thumb drive has not been located.
In making his decision, Judge Epps said he was worried about the missing USB drive that Winner had inserted into a government computer along with her notes and terrorists.
‘Whether that’s a joke or not, it still concerns me,’ he said.
Solari said that the prosecution was not trying to link the veteran to terrorism: ‘The government is not in any way suggesting the defendant has become a jihadist or that she is a Taliban sympathizer,’ Solari told the judge.
Solari detailed for the court the circumstances of Winner’s arrest by FBI agents. She said that one June 3, 2017, agents approached the defendant and she consented to the search, first taking her care of her cat and dog and swapping stories with the agents about their respective jobs.
She asked whether the agents were doing to take her phone as ‘she was teaching yoga tomorrow and would like to have it’.
Solari said that Winner admitted to the agents that she had accessed and printed a classified document, stored it in her car for a few days and then mailed from Augusta to a news agency ‘she admired’.
‘She said she was mad about what she had seen in the media and wanted to set it right’, Solari told the court.
Following the hearing, Winner’s parents left court in the company of her lawyers and declined to comment to the media.
The six-page indictment states Winner worked at a government agency from February to June in Georgia. During that time she had top-secret security clearance.
It then states Winner printed on May 9 a report from four days earlier, which focused on: ‘intelligence activities by a foreign government directed at targets within the United States’.
The FBI alleges Winner, who was in the Air Force for six years, was working as a government contractor last month when she copied a classified intelligence report containing top-secret information and mailed it to a reporter at The Intercept.
The website published a report on Monday based off a top secret NSA document that allegedly revealed efforts by Russian military intelligence to conduct a spear phishing cyber attack on a company and on local voter registration.
‘Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors… executed cyber espionage operations against a named US company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions,’ according to the document the Intercept published.