FORT WORTH (1080 KRLD)- The Alice, Texas native who was the number one leak target of the previous administration is out of prison.
In 2017, Winner, a 29-year-old former Air Force intelligence officer, leaked a document to the online publication the Intercept which showed Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Denied bail, Winner eventually pled guilty to a charge filed under the Espionage Act and was given five years and three months in federal prison. Her attorney Alison Grinter Allen says "we really need to start forgiving our truth-tellers, and a pardon for Reality Winner is a salve to the entire public, and it says we are going to take election security very seriously and we are going to protect the people that tell the American people the truth."
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She has been transferred to a halfway house in South Texas. Her family was able to pick her up from prison and drive her there.
Grinter Allen says Winner's time in Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth was very difficult.
She was in lockdown throughout covid and contracted the virus. "Reality was maintained at a level above what her normal Bureau of Prisons status would indicate because the system treated her special. She was in a national security detail. She never made it to lesser restrictive parts of the prison. When a normal release time came up we were nervous they would refuse to grant that because of her special status."
Her sentence is set to end in November.
"She served a longer sentence than anyone before for release of classified information to the media. It's pretty clear to us that she was sitting in prison basically to allay the insecurities of one man about the validity of his election."
She says their focus is on a pardon from President Biden. "She enters the world as a convicted felon, and that puts a lot of barriers in her way. The closest we can imagine to justice is to start dialing this back and making it right."
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