Reality Winner plans to enter a plea of not guilty to allegations that she leaked a highly classified report about Russia’s alleged involvement in the 2016 presidential election.
Winner, 25, a government contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA), was charged with leaking the document to The Intercept, an online news platform, according to NBC News.
Winner was arrested Saturday night and taken into custody at a county jail in Lincoln County, Georgia, where she’s awaiting a detention hearing scheduled for Thursday. The Intercept published the report on Monday.
"My client is innocent until proven guilty and we plan to enter a plea of not guilty," Winner's attorney, Titus Nichols, told NBC News.
A criminal complaint charges that Winners violated the Espionage Act, which prohibits "disloyal" forms of speech, by "removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet," according to the HuffPost.
The leaked document reportedly provides information about a Russian cyberattack that was conducted on a U.S. voting software supplier prior to the November election. The document states that Russian intelligence was privy to "multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards," according to HuffPost.
However, the document doesn’t give way to any evidence that proves the Russian cyberattack directly impacted voting.
"There’s not much to comment on right now as far as whether there is a connection between my client and Intercept," Nichols said, according to The New York Daily News. "I know that there is documents circulating on the Internet and everything else, but as far as concrete proof, we’re just not at that stage, yet."
Winners’ mother, Billie Winner-Davis, said her daughter was "terrified" when she arrived at her Augusta home on Saturday to see authorities waiting to arrest her, NBC News noted.
"Her words to me was that she was scared she was going to be….they were going to make her disappear," Winner-Davis said Tuesday, according to the network.
Winner-Davis said she’s still "a proud mom" amid what’s going on.
"I can’t ever call her a traitor or even believe that," she added. "No, that is not Reality. That’s not her."
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