REALITY WINNER
During the 2016 presidential election, Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, or GRU, launched cyberattacks in support of Trump’s campaign. In one of them, GRU sent spearphishing emails to local election officials in swing states hoping to trick them into opening the malicious attachment that would hack their computers. At the time, Trump called all of this “fake news.”
In 2017, then-National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower Reality Winner, who was 26, leaked a classified NSA document to The Intercept that described this GRU plot in detail. Trump’s Justice Department charged and convicted her under the Espionage Act. Midway through a trial, Winner entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to one charge. She was sentenced to five years and three months in prison, and three years of supervised release: the longest sentence ever given for the unauthorized release of classified documents to the media. (In June 2021, Winner was released early from prison.)
State election officials first learned about GRU’s spearphishing attack against them because of media reports, but only thanks to Winner; the NSA had failed to warn them. Two former election officials told CBS News’s “60 Minutes” that Winner’s disclosure helped secure the 2018 midterm election.
