There appears to be a misunderstanding about details revealed at the bail hearing for Reality Winner last week, where Magistrate Judge Brian Epps denied her bail. Epps did so because she allegedly said she said wanted to burn the White House down and because prosecutor Jennifer Solari — who sounds like she made some pretty inflated claims — suggested Winner might have more to leak. There’s no written record for this yet, but it appears from one of the less-shitty reports on the hearing that the claim is based on three things: First, Winner stuck a thumb drive in a Top Secret computer last year.
Winner inserted a portable hard drive in a top-secret Air Force computer before she left the military last year. She said authorities don’t know what happened to the drive or what was on it.
Second, because Solari portrayed the 25-year old translator’s knowledge as a danger unto itself (more ridiculously, she painted Winner’s knowledge of Tor — which Winner didn’t use to look up sensitive information — as a means by which she might flee).
“We don’t know how much more she knows and how much more she remembers,” Solari said. “But we do know she’s very intelligent. So she’s got a lot of valuable information in her head.”
And finally, because Winner told her mother, in a conversation from jail that was recorded, that she was sorry about the documents, plural.
Solari said Winner also confessed to her mother during a recorded jailhouse phone call, saying: “Mom, those documents. I screwed up.”
Solari apparently emphasized the latter point as a way to suggest Winter might still have documents to leak.
Solari stressed that Winner referred to “documents” in the plural, and that federal agents were looking to see whether she may have stolen other classified information.
The idea is that because Winner used the plural and she only leaked one document, there must be more she’s planning on leaking.
Except that doesn’t appear right.
It appears Winner actually already leaked two documents.
While the Intercept article describes a document, singular, what they actually appear to have gotten are two documents — the report on the Russian hacking, and one page of a two-page document laying out the hacks. The Intercept calls the second document “an overview chart.”
But the “chart” actually has its own separate pagination (indeed, its own separate pagination format). The “document” paginates by page number,
Whereas the “chart” paginates by pages out of total.
Moreover, the “chart” also uses a different title than the report.
That’s not to say they’re not related. It’s just two say that we already appear to have documents, plural, from Winner.
Moreover, are we really led to believe that 3 years after Edward Snowden succeeded in loading a bunch of documents onto a flash drive because he was in a remote facility where insider threat programs hadn’t yet been fully implemented, had SysAdmin access, and had pulled some strings to retain an outdated computer that had a port, a translator in an NSA or other military facility could use a flash drive without a very close accounting of what she downloaded?
Mind you, her attorney should have argued as much in the detention hearing if Winner really thinks these are multiple documents. But appears they are.