Reality Winner, Former N.S.A. Translator, Gets More Than 5 Years in Leak of Russian Hacking Report

Reality Winner, the former Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor who pleaded guilty in June to leaking a top-secret government report on Russian hacking, was sentenced on Thursday to five years and three months in federal prison.

Ms. Winner, 26, is the first person to be sentenced under the Espionage Act since President Trump took office. Prosecutors said her sentence was the longest ever imposed in federal court for an unauthorized release of government information to the media.

She was arrested in June 2017 and was held for more than a year while prosecutors built a case. She pleaded guilty in June 2018 to one felony count of unauthorized transmission of national defense information, for giving a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election to a news outlet.

Prosecutors said on Thursday that Ms. Winner’s actions merited a stiff sentence.

“Winner’s purposeful violation put our nation’s security at risk,” United States Attorney Bobby L. Christine told reporters after the sentencing in federal court in Augusta, Ga. He said the report she leaked revealed sources and methods of intelligence gathering, and its disclosure “caused exceptionally grave damage to U.S. national security.”

He added that she “knowingly and intentionally betrayed the trust of her colleagues and her country,” and was “the quintessential example of an insider threat.”

Ms. Winner was fresh out of the Air Force and a few months into a job as a translator for the National Security Agency in May 2017 when prosecutors say she printed a report from her work computer that detailed hacking attacks by a Russian intelligence service against local election officials and voter registration databases. She later told investigators that she smuggled the report out of the Augusta, Ga., offices of the contractor, Pluribus International, in her pantyhose, and then mailed it to the online news outlet The Intercept.

Following a trail of clues, the F.B.I. soon arrested Ms. Winner two days before the Intercept published the classified report.

Addressing Chief Judge J. Randall Hall in court on Thursday, Ms. Winner said she took “full responsibility” for the “undeniable mistake I made.” She said she “would like to apologize profusely” for her actions.

Ms. Winner’s lawyers asked the judge to take into account in sentencing that she had served honorably in the Air Force, had been a top student and had no prior criminal record. “She is someone who has done something she should not have done — and knows she should not have done,” John Bell, one of Ms. Winner’s lawyers, told Judge Hall. “But she’s not an evil person.”

Joe Whitley, a former federal prosecutor who was another of Ms. Winner’s lawyers, highlighted her military service, including assisting with more than 800 intelligence missions that he said had “removed” 100 enemies.

Federal guidelines allowed for a sentence of up to 10 years, but prosecutors agreed in June to a sentence of 63 months, to avoid a trial that would require discussing classified reports and intelligence gathering techniques in open court. Prosecutors argued in a sentencing memorandum filed this week that such a trial “would compound the exceptionally grave harm to national security already caused by the defendant,” and that the plea agreement “reflects a fair resolution of the defendant’s criminal culpability. ”

The judge imposed the sentence that prosecutors recommended.

In federal leak cases, the sentences are generally aligned with the scale of damage done to national security, according to Robert Cattanach, a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s civil division who represented security agencies. He said Ms. Winner’s sentence seemed to be an outlier.

“No one was endangered, no one’s identity was revealed, the Russians just learned that when they penetrate our systems, we can track them, which they already knew,” Mr. Cattanach said. “I think this kind of sentence, if anything, is designed to have a chilling effect.”

The Justice Department prosecuted Ms. Winner under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that made it a crime to disclose secrets that could be used to harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary.

Prosecutions under the law for leaking sensitive information to the news media, rather than to a foreign government, were once rare, and usually led to little if any prison time. But in recent years the Justice Department has been cracking down on such leaks.

Perhaps the best-known leaker, Chelsea Manning, was tried and convicted in a military court-martial, not a civilian court, for sending a vast archive of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. She was sentenced to 35 years, but served only about seven years; President Obama commuted the remainder of her sentence.

In 2013, a former F.B.I. agent was sentenced to 43 months for leaking classified information to The Associated Press about a foiled bomb plot in Yemen. That same year, a former C.I.A. agent, John Kiriakou, was given a 30-month sentence for revealing the identity of an undercover agent. In 2015, another former C.I.A. agent, Jeffrey Sterling, was sentenced to 42-months for leaking classified information to The New York Times about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

[Read: A security breach and spilled secrets have shaken the N.S.A. to its core.]

Ms. Winner, who grew up in Texas, seemed in some ways not to fit the popular image of someone who might try to circumvent the rules. A part-time yoga instructor who was fond of kale, owned rescued pets and drove a Nissan Cube with a bumper sticker saying “Be truthful, gentle and fearless,” she had passed several security screenings and had no history of disciplinary problems in the military.

But prosecutors said in court filings that she was a savvy and well-trained analyst whose political beliefs drove her to violate security restrictions. They said that in the months before she leaked the report, Ms. Winner had downloaded software that helped her hide her web searches and communications; had expressed support for Edward J. Snowden, the N.S.A. contractor who leaked a trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2013 and then took refuge in Russia; and had “repeatedly expressed contempt for the United States.”

“It’s literally the worst thing to happen on the planet,” she said of the United States in a Facebook chat with her sister in February 2016, according to prosecutors. “We invented capitalism, the downfall of the environment.”

When her sister asked if she really hated America, Ms. Winner replied yes, prosecutors said, though she added that her feeling was “mostly just about Americans’ obsession with air-conditioning.”

According to prosecutors, she printed out the classified report on May 9, the day President Trump fired James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. At a detention hearing last year, a prosecutor, Jennifer G. Solari, said that Ms. Winner had been “mad about some things she had seen in the media, and she wanted to set the facts right.”

Some advocacy groups have championed Ms. Winner as a whistle-blower, saying that the leak of the report alerted states to the dangers posed to elections by outside hackers — something that security agencies had been slow to do, according to a Senate report.

The Intercept, which published the material that Ms. Winner leaked, contributed financially to her defense. In a statement on Thursday, the organization’s editor in chief, Betsy Reed, said Ms. Winner had done a public service.

“The vulnerability of the American electoral system is a national topic of immense gravity, but it took Winner’s act of bravery to bring key details of an attempt to compromise the democratic process in 2016 to public attention,” Ms. Reed said. “Instead of being recognized as a conscience-driven whistle-blower whose disclosure helped protect U.S. elections, Winner was prosecuted with vicious resolve.”

Under the plea agreement, Ms. Winner will be transferred to the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ medical center in Carswell, Tex., where she can receive treatment for bulimia and be relatively close to her family.

Standing in front of the courthouse, one of her lawyers, Titus Nichols, disputed that her actions had been a “nefarious plot that she enacted to harm the country.” But he said that, in light of all the facts, he thought the sentence was fair.