Intercept – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

Reality winner leaves the Augusta Courthouse on June 8, 2017 in Augusta, Georgia. The winner is an intelligence industry contractor accused of leaking National Security Agency (NSA) documents.

Sean Rayford | Getty Images

Reality Winner, a former Air Force linguist who pleaded guilty in 2018 to leaked an intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections, has been released from prison, her lawyer said Monday.

“I’m very excited to announce that Reality Winner has been released from prison,” Alison Grinter Allen wrote in a post on Twitter. “She is still on remand during the re-entry process, but we are relieved and hopeful.”

According to a website from the Bureau of Prisons, Winner is currently in a re-entry facility in San Antonio. Your discharge date from the facility is November 23, 2021.

Winner, now 29, was 25 when she printed out a classified intelligence report at the Georgia National Security Agency facility where she worked and made it available to journalists for investigative news agency The Intercept.

A story based on Winners Leak was published on June 5, 2017 with the headline: “TOP SECRET NSA REPORT DETAILS RUSSIAN HACKING EFFORT DAYS BEFORE 2016 ELECTION.”

“Just days before the presidential election last November, Russian military intelligence launched a cyberattack on at least one US election software provider and sent spear phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials, according to a top-secret intelligence report by The Intercept.” said the article, written by journalists Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Sam Biddle and Ryan Grim.

Winner was sentenced to five years and three months in August 2018. According to Allen, Winner’s early release was not the product of “a pardon or compassionate release process, but rather the time earned through exemplary behavior during incarceration.”

CNBC policy

Read more about CNBC’s political coverage:

Allen added that Winner was still prevented from making public statements or appearances. Winner and her family, Allen said, “have sought privacy during the transition process as they work to heal the trauma of incarceration and rebuild the lost years.”

Winner’s case was an early example of the tough approach that President Donald Trump’s administration took against the defendants of divulging confidential government information. Prosecutors at the time said Winner’s sentence would be the longest serving a federal defendant for media leakage.

The case also reflected poorly on the source protection methods used by The Intercept. In 2017, Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed issued a statement acknowledging that “at several points in the editorial process, our practices have fallen short of the standards we adhere to to minimize the risks of source exposure when handling anonymously provided materials.”

Winner was arrested on June 3, 2017, two days before The Intercept published his article based on the document she provided. Investigators said they tracked down Winner after discovering that whoever leaked the secret document had printed it out. Sieger was one of only half a dozen people who had printed the document, and she had also used her work computer to email someone at The Intercept.

The winner’s release comes as the Biden administration is under pressure from aggressive maneuvers by the Justice Department under Trump to uncover the source of the leaked material. On Friday, the Inspector General of the Justice Department said he would investigate the previous seizure of electronic records from journalists in major news outlets and Democratic members of Congress as part of a leak investigation.

It was reported Monday that John Demers, a senior Justice Department official overseeing these leak investigations, will be leaving in two weeks. A Justice Department spokesman said Demers’ departure was planned prior to the latest scandal.

Subscribe to CNBC Pro for the TV livestream, deep insights and analytics.

Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras said in an open letter published Thursday that she was fired from First Look Media for publicly criticizing how the company reacted to its failure to protect the identity of an anonymous source currently in jail is located.

The source, Reality Winner, was working as a linguist for the National Security Agency when she provided top-secret government documents to The Intercept, an investigative website run by First Look Media founded by Ms. Poitras and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill.

Ms. Winner was arrested on June 3, 2017, two days before The Intercept published an article based on material she posted under the heading “Top Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Efforts Days Before the 2016 Election”. She was sentenced to more than five years in prison in 2018.

Betsy Reed, editor-in-chief of The Intercept, admitted to readers in a July 2017 notice that the publication had not done enough to protect Ms. Winner’s identity.

In the open letter, Ms. Poitras said the company had not responded with sufficient transparency about the aftermath of the story.

Ms. Poitras left The Intercept in 2016 but continued to work on film projects until she was released on November 30, advising for First Look Media. In an interview with the New York Times media, she accused the company of retaliation for criticizing the company from columnist Ben Smith.

In this interview, Ms. Poitras accused First Look Media’s investigation of failing to protect Ms. Winner and accused the company of “covering up and betraying core values”.

She returned to this criticism in the letter she published on Thursday on the website of her production company Praxis Films.

“Instead of conducting an honest, independent and transparent assessment with significant ramifications, First Look Media fired me for speaking out and exposing the gap between the organization’s supposed values and its practice,” she wrote.

Ms. Poitras added that the focus of her criticism was not that a source was exposed – “Journalists make mistakes, sometimes with dire consequences,” she wrote – but that research into the publication into handling the Winner story was inadequate .

First Look Media denied Ms. Poitras’ account, saying it refused to renew her contract because she was working on projects outside the company. It also defended its investigations.

“We did not renew the agreement with Laura Poitras on independent contractors because, despite our financial agreement, she has not worked for our company for more than two years,” First Look Media said in a statement. “This is simply not a sustainable situation for us or a company. For this and only for this reason, her contract was not renewed in 2021. Any implication that our decision was based on her speaking to the press is wrong. “

The Intercept was launched in 2014, with the help of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, after Ms. Poitras and Mr. Greenwald released blockbuster reports on National Security Agency secrets leaked by Edward J. Snowden. Her work won the Pulitzer Public Service Award, and Ms. Poitras won an Oscar for best documentary for Citizenfour, the 2014 film about Mr. Snowden.

Mr Greenwald left The Intercept in October claiming that an article he had written about Joseph R. Biden and his son Hunter had been censored by its editors, an allegation which the publication denied.