Reality Winner, the 25-year-old woman accused of leaking confidential government information, isn’t such a winner when it comes to facing reality.
According to her mother, Reality is “terrified” of what will happen to her after leaking documents to left-leaning outlet The Intercept. Billie Winner-Davis, Reality’s mother, told NBC News, “Her words to me was that she was scared she was going to be … they were going to make her disappear.”
Reality might be a criminal, but she’s not dumb. She served as a Senior Airman in the Air Force and speaks Farsi, Dari, and Pashto. The Air Force honored her with a Commendation Medal, citing her linguistic work that helped the military take out 100 enemy combatants. As a contractor for the NSA, she had access to documents pertaining to monitoring of supposed Russian activity in the United States.
Despite her service to our country, Reality wanted to do a disservice to the President. She made no secret of this, tweeting things like “#F**kingWall” and “TrumpIsAC**t.” She even went to bat for Iran over the United States. Reality tweeted an Iranian Foreign Minister, “If our Tangerine in Chief declares war, we stand with you!” She told Kanye West to make a shirt that said: “Being white is terrorism.”
How Winner managed to get a Top Secret security clearance is a mystery unto itself. Her social media was rife with explicit anti-Trump statements. This is not to say that everyone who holds a government clearance must like the President – they work for America, after all, which is more than just one guy. She was free to dislike the President so long as she did not actively seek to harm him or this country.
FBI agents followed Reality home from a grocery run, entered her home, and arrested her. Her mother says, “She was terrified, she was scared.” Her mother has pleaded in the media for her daughter to be spared from harsh punishment.
Nobody gets off easy for a crime because they’re afraid of prison (unless your name is Brock Turner. Don’t think we forgot, Brock.) Avoiding prison is easy with this one simple trick! Just don’t break the law.
But Winner did break the law. And now, she and her mother are panicking.
Her attorney, Titus Nichols, says that she will enter a “not guilty” plea on June 8. According to NBC News, the Department of Justice has said Winner admitted to the accusations against her, but Nichols told the Associated Press “if there is a confession, the government has not shown it to me.”
She’s one more millennial who makes the rest of us look bad by refusing to face consequences for her actions. Winner might be losing this case, but she’s left us an enduring lesson: Don’t leak top secret information. Federal agents will show up at your house, and your mother will be very upset.
