Saint or Sinner? Feds Arrest Suspect in Leak of Classified Documents

What happens when Americans find out the truth of a matter and not gaslighted with fake news? Is it better for the government to lie to us if it will cost dearly in many ways? When are secrets too secret? Will the suspect suffer the same fate as Assange? Snowden? Reality Winner? Just to name a few. So was the leaker a Saint for giving us the unvarnished truth? Or a Sinner that burned sources probably and will probably deny the same ability to  gather further intelligence. Perhaps costing lives.

I have struggled with this topic before here at Bunkerville. And there is a strangeness about all of it.

Why anyone who is anyone wants Julian Assange dead

May 15, 2019

“Everyone” in this case includes every major newspaper that published and received awards for publishing Wikileaks material; all major U.S. televised media outlets; and all “respectable” U.S. politicians — including, of course, Hillary Clinton, who was rumored (though unverifiably) to have said, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”

Mustang who posts here from time to time gave it a shot as well. He offers his take:

Julian Assange – About the Law

April 13, 2019 

How about Snowden?

Will the real Edward Snowden please stand up and who are your handlers?

September 20, 2016

Among the questions is how a contract employee at a distant NSA satellite office was able to obtain a copy of an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a highly classified document that would presumably be sealed from most employees and of little use to someone in his position.

A former senior NSA official said that the number of agency officials with access to such court orders is “maybe 30 or maybe 40. Not large numbers.”…

And not us forget Reality Winner. Sentenced to about 5, did about 3 years.

Ms Reality Winner faces ‘longest sentence’ for leaking NSA Classified Docs to Media

August 16, 2018

This is an odd thing. Cue up the conspiracy theories.

On a strange and bizarre note, why did the contractor she was employed by just since Feb 2017, for the most part only hire ex military women in their 20’s?

Interesting to note also that she gave the info to The Intercept who is run by the same guy that Snowden gave stuff to. Maybe Chelsea Manning can explain it. Better yet, in just four short months on the job she just happened to come upon and leak the story that The Intercept published about Russia’s so called interference in last year’s presidential election. Her bailiwick was Afghanistan intelligence. Just two cute by twice.

Staring to see this whole thing as a bit strange?

Now enter the latest leaker. One Jack Teixeira, 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

Rolling Stone: Their take on the happening:

Aric Toler, a researcher for investigative news outlet Bellingcat, first discovered that the Discord “Thug Shaker Central,” a home for fans of the YouTube influencer “Oxide,” had originally hosted the leaks. One member of the server told Bellingcat that the original poster of the classified material took on a role as an administrator at the server, where users freely posted racist content and discussed conservative politics.

Many young members of the Thug Shaker Central server held the leaker, dubbed “OG,” in high regard and viewed him as a father figure, according to The Washington Post. Former members of the server told the Post that OG had posted a trove of classified documents for months and that Thug Shaker had played host not just to Americans but users from Russia and Ukraine. 

Source Rolling Stone

Martha MacCallum’s take with questioning – she ends with “it’s a very very strange story.”

Fox News host Martha MacCallum has the latest on a newly surfaced picture of 21-year-old guardsman Jack Teixeira and footage of his arrest in the leak of classified documents on ‘The Story.

 

Saint? Tucker gives it his best and leaves many of us in an uncomfortable state of mind. Truth that comes at great cost or is it better to remain ignorant of the truth of the matter.

What is your take? The very best of the swamp.

Ms Reality Winner faces ‘longest sentence’ for leaking NSA Classified Docs to Media

 

We just learn that Ms Reality Winner is soon to be sentenced and facing years in prison. Maybe ten but not long enough by twice. I have dug deep into Ms Winner. It will be claimed she is a “mental case.” But she is far far more. Follow me down the rabbit hole and get out your extra strength tin foil.

 “A Georgia woman who mailed a secret U.S. report to a news organization faces the “longest sentence” ever behind bars for a federal crime involving leaks to the news media, prosecutors said in a court filing.

Former National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner, 26, is scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 23 by a U.S. District Court judge in Augusta. She pleaded guilty in June to a single count of transmitting national security information when she worked as a translator at an NSA facility in Augusta.

Winner’s plea deal with prosecutors calls for imprisonment of five years and three months. But the sentencing judge isn’t bound by that agreement. Winner’s crime carries a maximum penalty of 10 years.” From Gateway Pundit

Earlier:

The Deep State, Donald Trump, Reality Leigh Winner and a silent coup?

An NSA document purporting to show Russian military hacker attempts to access a Florida company which makes voter registration software is sent anonymously to The Intercept. A low-level NSA contractor, Reality Winner, above, is arrested almost immediately. What’s wrong with this picture? A lot.

 

Reality Winner’s place of work

Ms Reality Winner:

This is an odd thing. Cue up the conspiracy theories.

On a strange and bizarre note, why did the contractor she was employed by just since Feb 2017, for the most part only hire ex military women in their 20’s?

 

Interesting to note also that she gave the info to The Intercept who is run by the same guy that Snowden gave stuff to. Maybe Chelsea Manning can explain it. Better yet, in just four short months on the job she just happened to come upon and leak the story that The Intercept published about Russia’s so called interference in last year’s presidential election. Her bailiwick was Afghanistan intelligence. Just two cute by twice.

I have done two-part posts regarding “Deep State” operative Reality Leigh Winner? and Reality Leigh Winner, a useless idiot or did the ‘Deep State’ use her

I encourage everyone to check them out for the complete story.

My intention was to draw conclusions regarding facts that simply make no

Reality Winner

sense. I do believe Reality Leigh Winner who leaked Top Secret Documents was a willing patsy. Who it was that orchestrated the event in particular I won’t speculate.

I believe there were more involved. I believe also she was probably groomed for what happened. No less than ISIS grooms its potential converts. While in the Air Force her office was in the NSA building. I give you this fact to think about:

It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.”

I will let you wander over to Antiwar.com  and let Peter Van Buren do the theory thing about who benefits from Ms Winner’s illegal activity titled “Hey Intercept, Something Is Very Wrong With Reality Winner and the NSA Leak.” I agree with him.

I conclude with a segment from an earlier post: Are we about to inherit a Totalitarian State? The Silent Coup  October 25, 2016 — bunkerville. This was posted prior to the election.

“The Deep State, which “operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government.”

Zero Hedge ties up the loose knots and gives us a string of tin foil that is worth consideration.

So who or what is the Deep State?

…. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects. It’s the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take precedence over due process and justice. It’s the military empire with its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the nation.

It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.”

It’s what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies”: the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members of the defense and intelligence committees.

It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics. More at Zero Hedge

Senator Inouye,in 1987, summarizes here the coverup of the US Shadowy Government involvement; by saying:

“There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.”

Reality Leigh Winner, a useless idiot or did the ‘Deep State’ use her?

Useless idiot? Or did someone from the Deep State find a compliant vulnerable willing soul and use her? Another faux story to lead us down the wrong rabbit trail? How did a low-level contractor have access to high level Intel? An Afghanistan specialist with knowledge of three languages that happens upon a Top Secret Russian/Trump election document? She started off working intelligence in the Air force. The office location? In the same building as the NSA. Convenient wouldn’t you say? Then she went on to work at Pluribus. The first part of this tale I posted on Friday “Deep State” operative Reality Leigh Winner?

We pick up the story –

Her employer wasn’t just any employer.

Let’s look at her employer. Pluribus International Corporation

While purporting himself as being a writer of fiction, this report notes, Charles McCarry has spent the greater part of the past 40 years operating within the “Deep State”—and whose greatest accomplishment to date was using his son Nathan McCarry as the “figurehead” to establish a private spying company named Pluribus International Corporation, whose operations span the globe and lie at the very center of the vast US intelligence community.

Most bizarrely to note about Pluribus International Corporation, this report says, is that the vast majority of its nearly 210 employees are young woman with US military backgrounds—a philosophy explained by Nathan McCarry’s wife, Valerie McCarry, during a 2014 radio interview wherein she described her travails of being a young 20-year-old unwed mother raised in a US military family.

One such young female US military veteran hired by Pluribus International Corporation, this report continues, was a 25-year-old US Air Force veteran named Reality Leigh Winner—who aside from being a rabid anti-Trump “resistance” activist, spoke four languages—English, Farsi, Pashto and Dari.

Enter The Intercept:

Their first published story was an in-depth report about the NSA‘s involvement in the U.S. targeted killing program, which detailed the flawed methods which are used to locate targets for lethal drone strikes, resulting in the deaths of innocent people.^[6] This was followed by an article containing new aerial photographs of the NSA, NRO, and NGA headquarters.^[7]

In March 2014, The Intercept published leaked documents from Edward Snowden showing that the National Security Agency was building a system to infect potentially millions of computers around the world with malware.^[8] The report included a top-secret NSA animation showing how the agency disguised itself as a Facebook server in order to hack into computers for surveillance.^[9] 

The Deep State makes its move: 

Enter the U.S. Government Agency  – And this time The Intercept, in contrast to other leakers whose info they published, made no attempt to hide her identity. They had to know she would be outed. They contacted the government. They turned over her documents given to them. She twice had written to them prior to her sending the document. She was arrested by the FBI within hours of the publication by The Intercept.

The Chicago Tribune

Partly because the case was made so quickly, critics have condemned the Intercept’s reporters for having burned their source by failing to take proper operational security precautions. They point to the claim in the FBI’s affidavit that government investigators took note of the folds in the document shown to them by the Intercept and speculated that it had been printed by the leaker, a lucky guess on their part (especially since the folds could have been created instead by the journalists). In any event, that led the government to determine that only six individuals had printed this specific document, and only one — Winner — had been in contact with the Intercept from her personal email account, which she had accessed from her work computer. The case could not have been handed more easily to the government on a silver platter.

Ed: It is reported that the letter itself contained markings which identified the printer used. Was An Office Printer Behind Reality Winner’s Arrest? – Newsy Story.   But wait…Check what the Federal Complaint states: The News Outlet provided the U.S. Government Agency with a copy of this document. A copy not the original.

Enter the U.S. Government Agency:

Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a contractor with Pluribus International Corporation in Georgia, is accused of  (Full Complaint) “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet,” according to a federal complaint.

The Intercept identified as “The News Outlet.”

On June I, 2017, the FBI was notified by the U.S. Government Agency that the U.S. Government Agency had been contacted by the News Outlet on May 30, 2017, regarding an upcoming story.

The News Outlet informed the U.S. Government Agency that it was in possession of what it believed to be a classified document authored by the U.S. Government Agency. The News Outlet provided the U.S. Government Agency with a copy of this document.

The U.S. Government Agency has since confirmed that the reporting contains information that was classified at that level at the time that the reporting was published on or about May 5, 2017, and that such information currently remains classified at that level.

The story concludes tomorrow. See Reality Leigh Winner, a useless idiot or did the ‘Deep State’ use her?

Sources: Antiwar.com

Chicago Tribune

The Intercept – Wikipedia

What does it mean

Embedded links.

“Deep State” operative Reality Leigh Winner?

This is an odd thing. Cue up the conspiracy theories. On a strange and bazaar note, why did the contractor she worked for just since Feb 2017, for the most part only hire ex military women in their 20’s?    Interesting to note also that she gave the info to The Intercept who is run by the same guy that Snowden gave stuff to. Maybe Chelsea Manning can explain it. Better yet, in just four short months she just happened to come upon and leak the story that The Intercept published about Russia’s so called interference in last year’s presidential election. Her bailiwick was Afghanistan intelligence. Just two cute by twice.  So let’s take my ride down the rabbit hole. This is the first in a series on this gal:

An NSA document purporting to show Russian military hacker attempts to access a Florida company which makes voter registration software is sent anonymously to The Intercept. A low-level NSA contractor, Reality Winner, above, is arrested almost immediately. What’s wrong with this picture? A lot.

What Happened is… Curious and Curiouser…

Now let’s look at what we know so far about how this happened.

A 25-year-old improbably-named Reality Winner leaves behind a trail long and wide on social media of anti-Trump stuff, including proclaiming herself a member of The Resistance. Never mind, she takes her Top Secret clearance with her out of the Air Force (she had been stationed with the military’s 94th Intelligence Squadron out of Fort Meade, Maryland, co-located with the NSA’s headquarters) and scores a job with an NSA contractor. Despite the lessons of too-much-access the Snowden episode should have taught the NSA, Winner apparently enjoys all sorts of classified documents – her Air Force expertise was in Afghan matters, so it is unclear why she would have access to info on Russia hacking of U.S. domestic companies.

Within only about 90 days of starting her new job, she prints out the one (and only one apparently, why not more?) document in question and mails it to The Intercept. She also uses her work computer inside an NSA facility to write to the Intercept twice about this same time.

Winner has a clearance. She was trained as a Dari, Pashto, and Farsi linguist by the Air Force. She knows how classified stuff works. She has been told repeatedly, as all persons with a clearance are, that her computer, email, printing, and phone are monitored. She mailed the document from Augusta, Georgia, the city where she lives and where the NSA facility is located. She practiced no tradecraft, did nothing to hide her actions and many things to call attention to them. It is very, very unclear why she took the actions she did under those circumstances. We will look at the “maybe” why on Monday. More at Antiwar.com

See the two additional posts that follow:

• Reality Leigh Winner, a useless idiot or did the ‘Deep State’ use her?
• The Deep State, Donald Trump, Reality Leigh Winner and a silent coup?