A woman arrested in Augusta for leaking classified government documents has been released from federal prison.
The Bureau of Prisons website said Reality Winner is now in a residential transitional facility in San Antonio, Texas. She had been in a federal medical center in Fort Worth, Texas.
Winner was convicted in 2018 of one count of leaking national security documents and sentenced to more than five years in federal prison.
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According to court documents, at the time of her arrest in 2017, Winner was a National Security Agency contractor working for Pluribus International Corporation and was based at Fort Gordon.
Winner was arrested June 3, 2017, after federal agents searched the home she was renting on Battle Row in Augusta. Among the items in the search warrant were computers, documents and any contact she may have had with media outlets.
Court documents never listed the name of any media outlet. However, on June 5, 2017, an online news agency called The Intercept published an article based on what it identified as an NSA document detailing a cyber-attack by Russian military intelligence on a U.S. voting software supplier in 2016.
Winner was held in the Lincoln County detention center pending her federal court trial.
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In August 2018, Judge Randal Hall with the Southern District of Georgia court in Augusta approved a plea agreement with Winner pleading guilty to one count of “unlawful retention and transmission of national defense information” and sentenced her to 63 months.
In 2020, Winner’s sister said Reality had contracted COVID-19. A motion for “compassionate release” was filed but was denied.
Winner’s scheduled release from the transitional facility in November 2021. That will be followed by three years of supervised release.
Dana Lynn McIntyre is a Staff Reporter with The Augusta Press. You can reach her at dana@theaugustapress.com.
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