In late November, Reality Winner – who turned 33 this week – finished her lengthy punishment for sending a government document to a news organization.
It’s past time for her to be pardoned so that she can move on with her life and, particularly, her education. She wants to be a veterinary technician, get a good-paying job and move out of her mother’s Texas house, but having a felony in one’s background doesn’t help with any of that.
“She doesn’t deserve to be punished forever,” her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, told me in an interview this week. “You would think that once you’d served your sentence, you’d be okay, but that doesn’t seem to be true.”
A presidential pardon, of course, would help immensely, in removing the scarlet “F” from her record. And Biden, who pardoned his son Hunter just days ago, may find that the time is finally right since this, too, was a politically driven prosecution.
Winner has been treated harshly – scapegoated for an act she intended to be patriotic.
Because Donald Trump wanted to make an example of her, the US air force veteran and former National Security Agency (NSA) translator was hit with the longest prison sentence ever given for leaking government information to the media.
Her crime? She sent an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 elections to the investigative news organization the Intercept; the report indicated that Russian hackers had gained access to state-level voter information and apparently intended to use a “phishing” operation to hack it.
“A public service” was how the well-respected investigative reporter James Risen described what Winner did. After all, he noted, a US Senate report concluded that most state election officials found out about the Russian hacking threat from the press, not federal officials, “who didn’t bother to notify them”.
“And the main way the press found out about it,” Risen added pointedly, “was through Reality Winner”.
Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter for many years, got to know Winner while he was the director of the First Look Press Freedom Defense Fund, which paid her legal bills.
In an email to me this week, Risen said Winner is “incredibly smart and really nice, and was doing the right thing to help America”.
But her punishment was meant to send a message – that leakers (or whistleblowers) would be given no mercy, no matter how much the information they shared was in the public interest. And of course, Trump has been desperate to term any evidence of Russian interference, no matter how clear or troubling, as nothing but a hoax perpetrated by the liberal media.
The law is rigid in federal prosecutions of leak cases, Risen explained.
“The fact that a leak to the press is a public service is not admissible in court when a whistleblower is charged with the disclosure of classified information – even when a Senate committee concludes that it was a public service.”
Winner was denied bail and held in harsh pre-trial conditions for about a year before her trial. And her punishment included a strict provision that she can never be paid for telling her life story – whether in a book or through the several movies that have been made about her.
Winner’s attorney, Alison Grinter Allen, told me on Wednesday that the most helpful action for those who want to support a pardon is to communicate with their members of Congress. Online petitions don’t seem to be as effective in this administration as in past ones, she said.
The lawyer worries about how Winner’s case might somehow be reopened in a new vengeance-seeking Trump administration through a newly weaponized justice department.
“She’s already been targeted and made an example of,” Allen said.
The best hope, she thinks, is a letter signed by multiple members of Congress supporting a pardon; she and others are working on that, but a deadline is looming: “We’re running out of president.”
Reality Winner has served a harsh sentence for a patriotic, if illegal, act. She has a lot to offer the world if she’s allowed to move on.
And so, Biden, in the short time he has left as president, has the power to do the right thing.
In James Risen’s words: “She deserves a pardon.”
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
