The Justice Department filed charges on Monday against a 25-year-old woman accused of stealing Top Secret information and providing it to The Intercept.
Reality Leigh Winner is accused in the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Georgia, of “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet,” the Justice Department said.
Winner, who lives in Augusta, has worked for Pluribus International since Feb. 13, according to the complaint. She held a Top Secret clearance.
On May 9, “Winner printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information from an intelligence community agency, and unlawfully retained it,” the complaint says.
She then transmitted the information through mail to an online news outlet several days later.
The news outlet is not revealed in the complaint, but NBC News has reported that the recipient of the documents is The Intercept, a website founded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
The U.S. agency that contracts with Pluribus International is also not named, but the National Security Agency contracts work through the firm.
FBI agents interviewed Winner at her home on Saturday. During the interview she acknowledged that “she intentionally identified and printed” classified information “despite not having a ‘need to know,’ and with knowledge that the intelligence reporting was classified.”
“Winner further admitted removing the classified intelligence reporting from her office space, retaining it, and mailing it from Augusta, Georgia, to the news outlet, which she knew was not authorized to receive or possess the documents,” the complaint reads.
The U.S. agency notified the FBI of the breach on June 1. The news outlet to which Winner provided the information contacted the agency the day before and said that it was in possession of documents it believed were authored by the agency.
The news outlet said that it planned to publish an article based on the documents.
The federal complaint then states that the news outlet published the information on May 5. That appears to be an error. The Intercept published an article based on stolen NSA documents on Monday.
The documents contained Top Secret information about Russia’s attempts to hack into voter registration systems prior to the election last November.
The complaint reveals how the U.S. agency determined that Winner stole the documents.
The documents shared by the news outlet “appeared to be folded and/or creased, suggesting they had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space.”
The agency conducted an internal audit and determined that six individuals had printed the report, one of them being Winner.
“A further audit of the six individuals’ desk computers revealed that WINNER had e-mail contact with the News Outlet. The audit did not reveal that any of the other individuals had e-mail contact with the News Outlet,” the complaint states.
