[Vision2020] NSA Whistleblower & Patriot Reality Winner Still Jailed & Denied Bail

[Ted Moffett]

Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
***** Original material contained herein is Copyright 2000 through life
plus 70 years, Ted Moffett.  Do not copy, forward, excerpt, or reproduce
outside the Vision2020.Moscow.com <http://vision2020.moscow.com/>
forum without the express written permission of the author.*****
--------------------
Donations to Reality Winner's legal defense can be made at the website
below.

A scoundrel like Manafort gets house arrest while Winner is denied bail?
-------------------
https://standwithreality.org/action-to-take/#donate
-------------------
https://standwithreality.org/frequently-asked-questions/
*Who is Reality Leigh Winner?*

Reality Leigh Winner is a 25-year-old veteran who has dedicated her career
to serving the United States. Prior to becoming a federal contractor, she
served in the Air Force for 6 years, including as a language analyst —
Winner speaks Pashto, Farsi, and Dari.

She was honored with the Air Force Commendation Medal, for members who have
“distinguished themselves by meritorious achievement and service.” The
award noted that she “provided over 1,900 hours of enemy intelligence
exploitation and assisted in geolocating 120 enemy combatants.”

She has no criminal history. Her stepfather described her as “a patriot.”
Her mother Billie Winner-Davis said, “She loves children. She loves animals
… She’s not a threat to anyone.”

Outside of her work, she is a yoga instructor and dedicated social justice
advocate who speaks out in defense of racial justice and human rights on
social media.
---------------------------
https://standwithreality.org/russiagate-indictments-paul-manafort-rick-gates-reality-winner/
Russiagate Indictments: Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Reality Winner

November 3, 2017 | 0 comments
<https://standwithreality.org/russiagate-indictments-paul-manafort-rick-gates-reality-winner/#respond>
How is it that the only one in jail is the whistleblower?

If there was any doubt left that Reality Winner is being singled out for
outrageous mistreatment by her prosecutors, this week’s indictments against
Paul Manafort and Rick Gates should put that to rest.

Paul Manafort and Rick Gates are charged, among other things, with
“Conspiracy Against The United States”. Their offenses against the United
States, and the harm they did, are spelled out in great detail — they were
paid millions of dollars by a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party to lobby
the U.S. government on its behalf. They lied about acting on behalf of
foreign interests and about receiving the payments. They then laundered the
money to hide its source and avoid paying taxes.

The court correctly identified both men as flight risks, for the following
reasons, according to a CNN article:
<http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/31/politics/manafort-3-passports/index.html>


   - Manafort currently has three US passports, each under a different
   serial number. He has submitted 10 passport applications in roughly as many
   years, prosecutors said.
   - This year, Manafort traveled to Mexico, China and Ecuador with a phone
   and email account registered under a fake name. (The name was not disclosed
   in the filings.)
   - Over the past year, Manafort traveled to Dubai, Cancun, Panama City,
   Havana, Shanghai, Madrid, Tokyo and Grand Cayman Island.
   - Both Manafort and Gates were frequent travelers to Cyprus. “Extensive
   travel of this nature further evidences a risk of flight,” the prosecutor’s
   filing said.
   - Manafort wrote on loan applications and other financial documents that
   his assets were worth between $19 million in April 2012 and $136 million in
   May 2016.
   - In some months, like while he served as Trump’s national campaign
   chairman in August 2016, Manafort’s assessment of his total worth
   fluctuated. In August 2016 he said his assets were worth $28 million, then
   wrote he had $63 million in assets on a different application.
   - Gates “frequently changed banks and opened and closed bank accounts,”
   prosecutors said. In all, Gates opened 55 accounts with 13 financial
   institutions, the prosecutors’ court filing said. Some of his bank accounts
   were in England and Cyprus, where he held more than $10 million from 2010
   to 2013.

Because of all this, Federal prosecutors recommended that the men *merely
be placed on house arrest.*

In contrast, Reality has already served 5 months in jail despite not being
convicted of any crime. She is charged with leaking a single document to a
media outlet. The government has argued over and over again that they don’t
need to actually specify what harm, if any, Reality did to the United
States, despite charging her under a law which clearly requires it.

Reality’s prosecutors argued, with a straight face, that her life savings
of $30,000 and a short vacation to Belize earlier this year makes her a
“flight risk,” and that two or three sentences from her private
conversations are proof that she “hates America” and is a “danger to the
community”.

Meanwhile, Manafort and Gates are charged with doing clear, explicit,
quantifiable harm to the United States. Manafort spent more than Reality’s
entire life savings in illicit, laundered money at a single Florida art
gallery, and the only imposition on his freedom is an ankle bracelet.
The role of the Winner document in the Russia investigation

All of this is already an outrageous injustice. But what makes it so much
worse is that Reality’s alleged “crime” is *exposing to the public details
of the conspiracy that led to the charges against Manafort and Gates in the
first place.*

Reality’s connection to the broader Russia investigation has largely been
forgotten by the mainstream media, while they’ve focused on more
well-known, powerful officials instead. So it’s important to remember the
context of the document’s release.

Around the time Reality allegedly leaked the document, Donald Trump had
just fired FBI director James Comey, and special counsel Robert Mueller
hadn’t been appointed yet.

As far as Trump was concerned, the investigation was over. In a meeting
with Russian officials on May 10, according to an article in the New York
Times
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/us/politics/trump-russia-comey.html>,
Trump said:

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr.
Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times
by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s
taken off.”

Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.”

The conversation, during a May 10 meeting — the day after he fired Mr.
Comey — reinforces the notion that the president dismissed him primarily
because of the bureau’s investigation into possible collusion between Mr.
Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives.

According to an FBI affidavit, the document that eventually made its way to
The Intercept was printed *the day Comey was fired*, and mailed “a few day
later.”

When it was released, its shocking findings dominated the headlines:
Russian intelligence had used offensive cyber warfare techniques against
U.S. election systems, and the Trump administration was still keeping the
affected states in the dark about it.

This was much more far-reaching and technical interference by Russian
intelligence than anyone had even suggested up to that point. And it hit
the news at a time when Trump administration officials were insisting that
all the talk about Russia was just “fake news.” It wasn’t a sure thing that
the investigation into the Trump campaign would continue at all.

In James Comey’s testimony to Congress shortly after Reality’s arrest,
Comey said he also engineered a leak to the press to ensure that the
investigation into Trump would continue.

These leaks were all crucial to the effort to secure a broad and
independent investigation into the role of Russian interference in the 2016
election. Without these leaks, the investigation may not have gone forward,
or had the same amount of support from lawmakers.
What happens next?

The government cannot continue to justify holding Reality in jail given the
lenient bail conditions granted to Manafort and Gates. And the media can’t
continue to allow Reality’s unjust imprisonment, and the transparent
political motivations of her prosecutors, to go unnoticed.

The media always focuses its attention on the richest and most powerful,
the ones least in need of the extra publicity. Reality’s crucial
contribution to this ongoing investigation deserves a wider hearing. She
deserves bail on at least the same conditions granted to Manafort and
Gates, both of whom are accused of doing greater harm, and have far more
resources and connections enabling them to flee prosecution.

Most of all, she deserves due process — the government should be required
to *actually argue* what “harm” she did, especially when there’s so much
evidence that the Winner document has been an enormous *benefit* to the
public’s understanding of threats to our election systems.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20171107/8bf95ac6/attachment-0001.html>