The contractor, an Air Force veteran named Reality Winner, sent the document to The Intercept, a journalism site specializing in reporting leaks. But Winner admits now that she made a crucial miscalculation.
"What I had assumed was they would receive it [and] immediately assume that this was something that was important, that it answered very important questions that the country was having, that it would be protected," she says.
That's not what happened. Instead, in the process of fact-checking the document, the reporters assigned to the story sent the document to the FBI, which sent it to the NSA. The security agency easily identified Winner, a crypto linguist, as the source of the leak.
Looking back now, Winner says her timing could not have been worse; the Trump administration had been combatting a string of leaks. FBI director James Comey and the president "were both saying that they were going to nail the next leaker to the wall," she says. "And then I just happened to be the very next name popping up."
Winner was tried under the Espionage Act of 1917 and received the longest sentence to that point for leaking classified information to a media outlet. She accepted a plea deal, lowering her sentence of 10 years to five. She was released from prison in 2021.
Winner's story has been told in a 2021 documentary Reality Winner, the 2023 film Reality, and in the play Is This A Room, in which actors reenacted the transcript of the FBI interrogation of her. Now, she's looking back in a memoir titled I Am Not Your Enemy. It's not a tell-all, she says, because she's still bound by the non-disclosure agreement she signed with the NSA.
"I am under a lasting ... non-disclosure agreement to never talk about anything that could be related to classified information from my Air Force career as a linguist, and then, moving forward, anything that I had done as an NSA contractor, and furthermore, anything within the four corners of the document that I leaked," she says.
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