OPINION:
Reality Leigh Winner, the 25-year-old National Security Agency contractor just charged with leaking classified government information, has an interesting Twitter feed.
The information she’s accused of leaking provides details of Russia’s 2016 attack on a U.S. voting software supplier — information that coincidentally ended up in a news report from the left-leaning Intercept.
Information that coincidentally feeds into Democrats’ long-running messaging about President Donald Trump and his team’s supposed collusion with Russia to hack and steal the election.
Information that coincidentally furthers an anti-Trump mantra — the same anti-Trump mantra Winner herself put out on her private Twitter feed, the one she maintained under the name of Sara Winners.
“Well,” Sara-slash-Reality Winners wrote, in a Nov. 9 tweet, right after Trump won, Mashable noted. “People suck. #ElectionNight.”
A couple weeks later, she tweeted this: “Why burn a flag? @realDonaldTrump thinks crosses burn much better.”
And in January, this, a retweet of Mexico former president Vicente Fox’s message that read: “@realDonaldTrump, Mexico won’t pay for your wall. You say that America won’t neither. Then who’s left? It’s you and your #F—ingWall.” Winners added her own message to that retweet, short and sweet: “#NotMyWall.”
And Billie Winners, Reality’s teary-eyed mom, says her daughter’s not political.
“She never ever given me any kind of indication that she was in favor of [Edward Snowden-type leaks] at all,” her mother said, expressing shock and sadness at her daughter’s charges, CNN reported. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
Well, here’s an explanation that just night fit: Winner is political.
Winner doesn’t like Trump.
And Winner wanted to hurt Trump and help the Democrats — so much so that she risked her Top Secret security cleared career, reputation and freedom to do it. All allegations, of course, at this point. But her charges, if proven, carry up to 10 years in prison.
And her attorney’s trying to spin Winner as a pawn — as a sort of unwitting player in the passage of classified information that allegedly ended up in the hands an Intercept reporter.
“She just been caught in the middle of something bigger than her,” her attorney said, CNN reported.
Well, maybe — all in America are assumed innocent until proven guilty. But then again, maybe not. This is a woman who spent years in the military, was trained to speak in several different languages, and who had been cleared for a Top Secret security badge at her NSA contracting company position. She’s no dummy.
And what investigators found on her is rather damning. They accuse her of printing a document she had no business seeing, and then sending it out and about — possibly so that it ended up in the hands of the Intercept. Prosecutors even say she admitted during her June 3 arrest she leaked the document, an admission that her attorney will no doubt spin a bit, or outright challenge, as court proceedings continue.
But given her political leanings, it would seem her actions, purposeful as prosecutors allege, might actually have a seedier side, a more political side, aimed not so much at whistleblowing a truth she thinks the public needs to know, for security and safety reasons, but rather at harming a president with whom she disagrees.
On surface, at least, Winner’s alleged actions smell of a politically motivated hit by yet another anti-Trumper. We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out in court. But it’s obvious she’s no Trump fan. It’s obvious the information she’s accused of leaking is anti-Trump in nature. And it’s obvious this whole story has handed the Democrats yet another matchstick to light the flames of their tiresome Trump-stole-the-election fires.
Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame wants the world to rally to Winner’s support. But I say wait for the motivation and facts to become clear. Masking political hits as whistleblowing is pretty unAmerican. If Winner is just an anti-Trump hack, and she used her Top Secret clearance to go after the president, that’s a far less honorable — and forgiving — scenario than risking all for the purpose of saving Americans from security threats. And if it is a political hatchet job, it’s one that’s well worthy of harsh punishment.
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