25-year-old Reality Winner may be a hero to some deranged folks on the left, but she’s likely going to be enjoying her infamy from inside the confines of a prison cell for a long, long time to come. The accused leaker of classified NSA documents was denied bond on Thursday, partially because prosecutors revealed that she had written a number of disturbing, anti-American statements in her private notebook.
One of these treasonous comments apparently outlined Winner’s desire to “burn the White House down” and retreat from the country – or, as she put it: “find somewhere in Kurdistan to live.” She also apparently wrote that she was thinking about traveling to Afghanistan and pledging her allegiance to the Islamic Taliban. These comments, argued government lawyers, proved that she was a flight risk and should be kept in jail to await her trial.
Winner’s defense lawyers aren’t putting up much of a case. While she is pleading not guilty to the charges of leaking classified material to an outside website – widely believed to be The Intercept – her lawyer made the odd argument that she’s being prosecuted merely because she’s adept at technology.
“Because my client is a millennial and she knows how to use technology, that’s somehow proof of evil intent,” said attorney Titus Nichols. “The government is scraping and clawing to build a mountain out of a molehill.”
Winner, whose social media feeds were rife with some of the most disgusting anti-Trump rhetoric on the internet, has attracted some big-name supporters in the wake of her arrest. Supporters like Trump arch-enemy Rosie O’Donnell, who has begun raising money for the leaker’s defense fund.
“I support Reality Winner, speak truth to power,” O’Donnell wrote on Twitter Thursday along with a link to a GoFundMe page. In other comments, O’Donnell said that Winner was “brave not careless” and a “patriot” for sending the documents to the website.
Which, of course, Winner is claiming she didn’t do…
The Justice Department has not specifically outlined the documents Winner stole or the website that published them, but they do cite a date of May 5 – the same date that appears on the NSA material published by The Intercept last week. Winner was arrested only an hour after The Intercept’s article went live.
In the material, we see that the NSA suspects Russia of having infiltrated a voter registration firm prior to the 2016 election – a spear-phishing expedition that could have theoretically had consequences for the vote itself. The document, however, does not draw any conclusions about whether or not any such consequences came to pass.
