Accused Media Leaker Remains Jailed While Other Alleged Security Risks Get House Arrest or Bond

[deminks]

https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/sites/dailyreportonline/2017/12/01/accused-media-leaker-remains-jailed-while-other-alleged-security-risks-get-house-arrest-or-bond/?slreturn=20171102074511

Despite the best efforts of her legal defense team, accused news media leaker Reality Winner will remain in jail until her trial on espionage charges next year, a federal judge in Augusta has ruled.

The decision by Judge J. Randal Hall, chief of the Southern District of Georgia, makes the 25-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran and NSA contract worker just the second person charged with illegally disclosing or retaining classified information in the past two decades to be denied bond while awaiting trial, according to legal briefs filed by a team of lawyers led by former U.S. attorney and Department of Homeland Security general counsel Joe Whitley.

Hall’s Nov. 27 ruling affirms an earlier decision by U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps to deny Winner bail.

By contrast, Winner’s lawyers cited more than a dozen cases where defendants facing similar charges were granted a bond. Almost all of them, the defense argued, were longtime government employees who had “disclosed or retained far more classified information” than the one-page document Winner allegedly leaked to online news outlet The Intercept. Among them: Gen. David Petraeus, accused of sharing classified intelligence and the identities of covert officers with his mistress; former CIA officer John Kiriakou, accused of leaking the identity of colleagues involved in enhanced interrogation programs to a reporter; and Jeffrey Sterling, another former CIA officer accused of leaking classified information about the nation’s efforts to sabotage Iranian nuclear research to The New York Times.

The document Winner has been accused of leaking, a redacted version of which was published by The Intercept, detailed how deeply Russian hackers had penetrated state and local voting and election infrastructures across the country prior to the 2016 presidential election.

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Original article:

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/