The mother of a former US intelligence analyst and the first whistleblower arrested during the Trump era said it made her “sick” that Russian agent Maria Butina was scheduled to be realized from a Florida prison Friday and deported – while her daughter remains locked up.
“This makes me sick. My daughter Reality Leigh Winner remains imprisoned for warning us of an atrack (sic) on our election and a spy goes free. #FreeRealityWinner,” Billie Winner-Davis said on Twitter on Friday morning.
Butina, a pro-gun activist who infiltrated conservative political circles as a secret agent for the Kremlin, will be released from a low-security prison in Tallahassee, where she served 18 months for working as an undeclared agent of a foreign government without registering in the US.
The red-headed inmate will be sent packing back to Moscow accompanied by two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, her lawyer Robert Driscoll told the Washington Examiner on Thursday.
Reality Winner, 27, a US Air Force veteran, was sentenced in August 2018 to more than five years behind bars as part of a deal in which she pleaded guilty to leaking a classified National Security Agency document about a 2016 Russian cyberattack on a supplier of American voting software.
In 2017, while working as a federal contractor assigned to the NSA in Georgia, Winner leaked the classified document providing details of the Russian cyberattack.
The document served as the basis for an article by The Intercept, an online news outlet that said it received it anonymously, though Winner was arrested before it was posted.
“They don’t want the world to be exposed to the real Reality Winner,” Winner-Davis told CNN in May about her daughter, who is imprisoned at FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas.
“The prosecution painted her to be a very evil person, who hates her country … who needed to be feared by the American people,” she said about her daughter, who received the Air Force Commendation Medal in 2016.
“And I honestly believe they are afraid that if America gets to know who Reality Winner really is, they are going to see that wasn’t the case at all,” she added.
Her daughter, who worked in the Air Force’s drone program, is serving the longest sentence ever imposed on a journalistic source by a federal court, according to the Department of Justice.
The US secured Winner’s conviction under the World War I-era Espionage Act, though prosecutors do not call her a spy, and in her plea agreement, prosecutors noted that the document she leaked was sent to a news outlet and not a foreign adversary.
Her supporters argue that other figures in the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election have received far more lenient treatment — including Butina, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as a Russian agent.
Winner-Davis told CNN that her daughter “is not a traitor. Reality served her country. She protected and defended us.”
She added: “What did she release? She released something that actually helped us to defend ourselves against an attack by Russia.”
Butina pleaded guilty last year to conspiring with a senior Russian official to access the NRA and other groups from 2015 until she was arrested last July. She said she was “ashamed and embarrassed” by her actions — but always insisted she was not a spy.
She admitted to working with Paul Erickson, her GOP operative boyfriend, “to establish unofficial lines of communication with Americans having power and influence over US politics … for the benefit of the Russian Federation,” according to court papers.
Erickson, who managed the 1992 presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan, was indicted in February in South Dakota over what the feds said was an unrelated investment fraud scheme.
In her plea papers, Butina said she worked under the direction of former Russian government official Alexander Torshin, a lifetime NRA member. She did not admit to and was not charged with espionage.
Source: Read Full Article