Convicted and sentenced to over five years in prison, National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Reality Winner is speaking out for the first time…and she is thanking President Trump for a tweet?
Air Force veteran and former NSA contractor Reality Winner is beginning her lengthy prison sentence after pleading guilty to crimes under the Espionage Act of 1917. The angry young woman, motivated by the results of the 2016 Presidential election, had intentionally leaked top-secret documents to an online news outlet in an attempt to damage and invalidate the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Her social media history reveals a person who has disparaged and cursed President Trump, claiming that he wasn’t her president while pledging allegiance to the Islamic Republic of Iran over her own country. Accusations like “orange fascist” are being replaced by a song of a different tune: thankfulness.
“I just feel like I would really get along with our president,” Reality Winner said from her prison cell.
The change in tone shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the Winner case, as Ms. Winner was caught before her first court hearing telling her family that she was “going to play that card being pretty, white, and cute…and cry.” Winner had also been recorded in prison phone calls coordinating PR campaigns with her mother, telling Billie Winner-Davis to “play up” the concerns over Winner’s safety and mental health before her trial began. Now, it appears that Team Winner is going to focus on a possibly out-of-context tweet by the President in order to drum up support for a possible pardon or commutation.
Ex-NSA contractor to spend 63 months in jail over “classified” information. Gee, this is “small potatoes” compared to what Hillary Clinton did! So unfair Jeff, Double Standard.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 24, 2018
Leaning on a hopeful interpretation of the President’s tweet, Winner has said that when she learned what President Trump had tweeted she “Roared like a lion. I dropped the phone and I sat on the floor and cried and said, ‘I want my family,’ over and over again.” Her mother replied to the President’s tweet: “Please pardon my daughter Reality Winner.” Winner has said that her legal team is already working on her request for a pardon. Winner is currently serving a sentence of 63 months after having admitted to smuggling classified documents out of her office in her pantyhose; she has already been incarcerated at Lincoln County Jail since June 3, 2017.
“I don’t like to assume anything as to what’s going on in his head, but the ‘small potatoes’ was a breath of fresh air. It really made me laugh. It reminded me of me and my own family. We try to make a joke out of everything. We laugh every single day no matter how bad things get, and he really gave a whole sense of humor to the thing ’cause it is quite bizarre,” Reality Winner intimated from jail.
Unfortunately, it seems much more likely that somebody is going to have to break the bad news to Reality about what the President was actually saying. When President Trump calls the situation unfair while mentioning Hillary Clinton, it seems clear that he is upset that the 2016 Democratic Party presidential candidate has not been prosecuted and sent to jail for her deliberate mishandling of classified information. To equate this with the President saying that Winner shouldn’t be doing any jail time at all seems more than a little foolhardy. To say that what Winner did is “small potatoes” when compared to Clinton’s crimes doesn’t mean that Winner should go unpunished, but more along the lines of the Hillary should be in a cell next to Winner.
