Alleged NSA leaker Reality Winner's interrogation transcript filed in court

Josh Gorstein
Politco
Fri, 29 Sep 2017 17:51 UTC

© Sean Rayford/Getty Images

Reality Winner exits the Augusta Courthouse June 8 in Augusta, Georgia.

'I wasn't trying to be a Snowden or anything.'

A National Security Agency contractor accused of leaking a classified report on Russian hacking aimed at the 2016 election told FBI agents she smuggled the document out of a high security intelligence facility in her pantyhose.

That and other details appear in a transcript federal prosecutors filed in court Wednesday detailing the interrogation of 25-year-old linguist Reality Winner by the FBI as they carried out a search warrant at her home in June.

After insisting for some time that she printed out the report and kept it on her desk for a few days before disposing of it in a burn bag, Winner caved and acknowledged she hid the document before sending it off to a news outlet, now known to be The Intercept.

"So how did you get it out of the office?" FBI agent Justin Garrick asked.

"Folded it in half in my pantyhose," Winner replied.

The transcript - filed with a federal magistrate judge as part of the government's effort to keep Winner behind bars - also provides new details on Winner's explanation for why she allegedly took a copy of the document from the NSA facility at which she worked at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia.

Winner appears to say she believed the contents of the report - which described Russian spearfishing cyberattacks aimed at U.S. voter registration databases - should be in the public debate.

"I saw the article and was like, I don't understand why this isn't a thing," she said. "It made me very mad ... I guess I just didn't care about myself at that point. ... Yeah, I screwed up royally."

Winner told the agents that she knew the report implicated intelligence sources and methods. She said, though, that she thought it was likely the flood of leaks and disclosures on the topic - apparently Russian hacking focused on the U.S. election - had already exposed those techniques.

"Did you know that if that got out, that those sources and methods could be compromised?" Garrick asked.

"If they hadn't been already, then yes," Winner said. "I figured that ... that it didn't matter anyway. Umm, honestly, uh, I just figured that whatever we were using had already been compromised, and that this report was just going to be like a - one drop in the bucket."

She added: "Seeing that [information] that had been contested back and forth in the public domain for so long, trying to figure out, like, with everything else that keeps getting released and keeps getting leaked - why isn't this getting - why isn't this out there? Why can't this be public?"

Winner later acknowledged she didn't know for sure that the sources used for the report were already disclosed.

The transcript hints at possible political motivations for the leak. Winner says she objected to her workplace tuning the TV to Fox News. She also had a signed photo of CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper, although she said the signature was fake.

"I wasn't trying to be a Snowden or anything," Winner said, referring to NSA leaker Edward Snowden and his massive disclosures of details on U.S. government surveillance. "I guess it's just been hard at work because ... I've filed formal complaint about them having Fox News on, you know? Uh, at least, for God's sake, put Al Jazeera on, or a slideshow with people's pets. I've tried anything to get that changed."

Despite Winner's statement to the FBI agents, prosecutors say that in a Facebook chat in March with her sister, Winner said she was on the "side" of both Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The transcript made public Wednesday also contains some surprises.

While the government has been cagey about which agency Winner worked for, the document makes clear she worked at an NSA facility unveiled to the media under tight security in 2012. It also says she was assigned to "the Iranian Aerospace Forces Office."

Those kinds of details are usually considered classified, although the transcript is marked as having been downgraded from "Secret" to "Unclassified." The Justice Department news release and charging documents made public in June do not mention the NSA or Winner's specific assignment there. Officials have also declined to confirm that the report Winner is charged with leaking was produced by the NSA, but the transcript seems to confirm that fact.

The transcript filed publicly with the court Wednesday initially included Winner's social security number and date of birth, information excluded from public court filings under court rules. The password for the computer she had at home at the time of the search was also included.

Some information detailing the nature of the specific intelligence report Winner is accused of leaking was blacked out from the transcript placed in the court record. Quotes from portions of the transcript were included in previous court filings.

After POLITICO inquired with a Justice Department spokesman about the appearance of Winner's social security number and date of birth in the publicly filed document, prosecutors refiled the transcript with that information removed.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps has scheduled a hearing for Friday on Winner's request to be released pending trial, currently set for March 1. Prosecutors say federal sentencing guidelines call for her to receive at least a nine year prison term if she goes to trial and is convicted.

Comment: More background:

• Intercept leaker, Reality Winner, pleads not guilty to espionage charges
• How to burn a source, or why you shouldn't trust the Intercept

And from Just how serious was Russia's 'probing' of the US election system?

Washington's Blog asked Bill Binney, the NSA executive who created the agency's mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a "legend" within the agency and the NSA's best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened ("in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union's command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons").

Binney told us:

If you think about this article [the story by the Intercept], and assume it's true, then hacking a few days before the election is a little late if they really wanted to influence the voting.

To me, this sounds more like fishing for information to find out as much as they could about the democratic party much like the Chinese did hacking the OPM [U.S. Office of Personnel Management] files. I'm sure the Chinese found more use for the data they got then the Russians did on the Democratic party because Hillary did not win.

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi agrees:

The Intercept article cites an unnamed intelligence official who "cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive." To that I would add, "even if it is all true as described."

And I would also make some additional observations about what the report and Intercept article are suggesting. First and foremost would be the questions of scale and timing.

There is no evidence that the Russians, or whoever carried out the probes, were able to tamper with either the actual voting process or the tabulation of votes. Indeed, the NSA report dismisses any such possibility. Second, corrupting an election in a country as large as the United States with an electoral system that is largely decentralized would require much more than a probe of 122 local officials starting a week before the balloting. So there was clearly no intention to disrupt the election or to tilt it in a certain direction based on the evidence provided by the NSA report.

I would also note that there is no proof provided in the report to support the assertion that the GRU, Russian military-intelligence service, carried out the probes. Would a highly-sophisticated intelligence service behave so transparently in an operation that would certainly be regarded as highly sensitive? I think not. Cut-outs would have been used to misdirect anyone looking to determine the hand behind the hacks.

All of which is not to say the Russian government didn't do it or order it done, but it seems to me that the revelations provided in the NSA report do not go very far beyond the kind of random probings that are part and parcel of foreign-intelligence operations as carried out by any sophisticated service. Did someone in Moscow think it might be useful to have some kind of idea of how to meddle with U.S. election technology if that type of info might prove useful down the road? Quite possibly. It should be noted that the U.S. National Security Agency illegally collects vast quantities of information on ordinary Americans but that does not necessarily imply intent to use it in a malicious way. It is a desirable capability and intelligence agencies are always working to expand their reach.

So was Russian intelligence probing U.S. electoral systems? Quite plausibly yes, and it should be a matter of concern for every American as it suggests a vulnerability in the electronics behind how we vote. But did Russia actually interfere with the election or seek to use the probing to elect a particular candidate? The answer is clearly no. The article and the document it is based on should serve as a wake-up call to those who are complacent about the security of our technologies. But on a political level, we are back to square one, with often hysterical allegations surfaced as part of the media and political storm we now refer to as Russiagate.