Mother of NSA Contractor Accused of Leaking to Media on Russian Election Hacks Defends Her Daughter

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Billy Winner-Davis with Dobby. (Photo: R. Robin McDonald/ALM)[/caption] Reality Winner’s mom is tired of keeping her own counsel while the federal government brands her 26-year-old daughter a spy. It has been eight months since FBI agents arrested Winner—then employed by a contractor for the National Security Agency—and charged her with espionage for allegedly leaking a classified document to an online news magazine. What prompted Billie Winner-Davis to break her silence was a Jan. 31 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit that closed any chance her daughter had of being released on bond. The federal appellate court, she said, homed in on statements Winner made that she says were deliberately misconstrued by prosecutors, who repeatedly referenced them in court hearings and court papers as evidence Winner posed a danger to the nation. “We have to counter this,” Winner-Davis said in an interview from her daughter’s sparsely furnished, cinder block home in Augusta, Georgia. “Somebody has to tell the American people this is not who she is. She is not a traitor or a spy or a bad person.” “To me, this is not how the American justice system is supposed to operate,” continued Winner-Davis, who was employed for 26 years with Texas Child Protective Services. “I want people to really pay attention. I want the courts to know people are watching. I don’t want them to feel like they can do whatever they want to her.” Winner-Davis fears her daughter’s prosecution and incarceration until trial are intended to send a message to anonymous leakers, whom President Donald Trump has railed against since his inauguration. “Reality is the very first” accused leaker arrested by the Trump administration, she said. Winner is represented by a team of lawyers from Baker Donelson led by Joe Whitley, who has served as U.S. attorney in Atlanta and in Macon as well as general counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Whitley was retained by Baruch Weiss of Washington's Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer. Weiss' client, First Look Media, owns The Intercept, which published the document Winner has been accused of leaking and is helping to fund Winner's defense. Winner-Davis' worries stem from tactics she said federal prosecutors have employed to keep her daughter locked up. She said her daughter's casual Facebook chats with her sister months before the document in question was leaked, phone calls with family after her arrest and what Winner-Davis called harmless internet browsing have been weaponized to portray her daughter as an enemy of the state. Winner-Davis also said prosecutors have engaged in a double standard. She said that prominent men—among them Gen. David Petraeus, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and aide Rick Gates—were all released on bond while litigating their federal charges. And, she added, "I think that she is being treated differently than a man would be treated." Winner-Davis also talked about her fear that the NSA is monitoring her calls, emails and social media posts as well as those of her daughter’s friends and family, then sharing them with federal prosecutors to use against her daughter."I have been told that getting involved with Reality means you are on their radar," Winner-Davis continued. People who write to her daughter or support her in online forums, "have to realize that everything they write her is being scanned. … Their name is being put in a computer and they are being researched."The five-page document Winner is accused of leaking—a redacted version of which was published by The Intercept—detailed how Russian hackers targeted state and local election officials across the country and the private companies that serviced them in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Bloomberg News, citing anonymous sources, augmented The Intercept report with additional information that hackers targeted 39 states and tried to delete or alter voter data in Illinois. That report came 10 days after Winner’s arrest, That same day, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was “too much leaking” and cited “one successful case very recently in Georgia” where the defendant “has been denied bail … and is being held in custody.” Three weeks after Winner’s June 3 arrest, the Department of Homeland Security’s acting director of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis Cyber Division testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that hackers linked to the Russian government tried to penetrate election-related computer systems in 21 states. Winner-Davis bristles at what she says are prosecutors' efforts to use her daughter's military training as fodder to deny her bond. Winner, fluent in Farsi, Dari and Pashto, was honorably discharged from the Air Force in December 2016. She then began looking for a job that would take her overseas to war-torn countries in the Middle East, where she "had such high hopes to go out and help people," Winner-Davis said. “She wanted to do humanitarian work. … It wasn’t to join the Taliban,” she said. Winner-Davis said the U.S. Air Force awarded her daughter a commendation for identifying more than 600 enemy targets that resulted in their capture or death and assisting in drone strikes by doing real-time translations. "She would identify who the enemy was and what they were doing, and she would identify threats to our forces,” Winner-Davis said. After Winner unsuccessfully applied for jobs with the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and Samaritan’s Purse, Winner-Davis said it was no surprise that her daughter would begin researching the possibility of going abroad on her own. Prosecutors used those online searches, Winner’s desire to deploy abroad and her military training to argue she was “an attractive candidate for recruitment by well-funded foreign intelligence services and non-governmental organizations and media outlets that advocate and procure the unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Solari wrote in one brief contending Winner should remain in custody. “The defendant has researched how to move to areas of the world in which she would be very difficult to apprehend, and she possesses language skills that would enable such a move—as well as knowledge of highly classified information to trade for assistance, ” Solari said. Winner-Davis said the government has also highlighted statements pulled from Winner's online chats that she said reflected her daughters' mordant brand of humor rather than an underlying threat. According to prosecutors, Winner told her sister she wanted “to burn the White House down. Find somewhere in Kurdistan to live … or Nepal.” They said she labeled Donald Trump “an orange fascist” and that she was “on the side" of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. They noted that Winner once told her sister, “I have to take a polygraph where they’re going to ask if I’ve ever plotted against the government. #gonnafail.” During one chat, Winner told her sister, "I only say I hate America three times a day"—a phrase prosecutors have suggested reflects a sinister intent. But, Winner also told her sister, "It's mostly just about Americans' obsession with air conditioning." “We’re like the worst thing that’s ever happened to this planet,” Winner added. “We are the inventors of capitalism, and we’re ruining the environment.” Winner is a tree-hugger, not a traitor, her mother said. Her daughters, she added, are vegans, and “extremely conscious about their planet, about their world. They recycle like crazy. They both live minimalistically. Neither one of them likes to have a lot of material things.” Prosecutors also have argued in court pleadings that Winner’s guilt, prior to any trial, is reason enough to keep her locked up. They said she acknowledged taking the document and leaking it, in what they described as a “voluntary interview” with the FBI and, later, in a recorded conversation with her sister from jail. Agents interviewed Winner in a back room of her house for hours before they took her into custody. They told her they had search warrants for her house, her car and her person, yet failed to give her a Miranda warning, according to a redacted transcript of the interview prosecutors filed. Those alleged admissions and whether the interview was truly voluntary are being challenged by Winner’s lawyers as both impermissible and inadmissible in court. Winner-Davis said prosecutors also have been dismissive of her own testimony on her daughter’s behalf. In court pleadings, prosecutors suggested there's a side of Winner’s personality “unknown to many of those close to her—and certainly unknown to the family members [Winner] has offered as witnesses." Winner-Davis said that, at one hearing where she testified, Solari asked her about her social media posts in support of her daughter and her references to Winner as a patriot. Solari suggested that Winner-Davis believed her daughter was a patriot for leaking classified information to the media. Winner-Davis said she told the prosecutor she doesn’t know whether her daughter committed the crimes she is charged with. “She is a patriot because she defended her country vigorously,” she said. Winner-Davis said she is also alarmed that prosecutors and the judges presiding over her daughter’s case have cast a blanket of secrecy over much of the litigation. Last August, Magistrate Judge Brian Epps sealed court records that refer not only to materials the government considers classified but also to published news reports the government claims may have derived from classified information. Only people with top-secret security clearances may view evidence the government considers classified but intends to use in seeking Winner's conviction. Winner-Davis said that her years working for Child Protective Services means she is no stranger to the courts. But in her daughter’s case, “I have never seen anything like it,” she said. "If you read the court’s ruling, they have convicted her already." “All I ask,” Winner-Davis, added, “[is] that she be treated fairly, that their treatment of her is congruent with what they say she has done.”