NSA Leaker Reality Winner ARRESTED After Leaking Document PROVING Tried Russian Hacking US Election

NSA Leaker Reality Winner ARRESTED After Leaking Document PROVING Russian Hacking Of US Election

Barely an hour after a news organization published an article about a Top Secret National Security Agency document on Russian hacking, the Justice Department announced charges against a 25-year-old government contractor who a senior federal official says was the leaker of the document.

The May 5, 2017 intelligence document published by The Intercept, an online news organization, describes new details about Russian efforts to hack voting systems in the U.S a week prior to the 2016 presidential election. While the document doesn’t say the hacking changed any votes, it "raises the possibility that Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results."

Even as the document was ricocheting around Washington, the Justice Department announced that a criminal complaint was filed in the Southern District of Georgia charging Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a federal contractor, with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.

The complaint did not link the charges with the story, but a senior federal official confirmed to NBC News that Winner is the accused leaker of the document published by the Intercept. The NSA has a large facility in Georgia. The complaint says she admitted to printing out the document and mailing it to the news outlet.

It adds that the government found evidence that Winner "had email contact" with the news outlet, and that Winner was one of just six individuals who had viewed the intelligence reporting since the U.S. government published it internally. She was arrested by the FBI at her home Saturday, according to a senior federal official. She faces a single charge of "gathering, transmitting or losing defense information."

Winner is a contractor with Pluribus International Corporation, authorities said. She had been employed at the facility since on or about February 13, and held a Top Secret clearance.

Her attorney, Titus Thomas Nichols, told NBC News that his client is "looking forward to putting this behind her," and has no prior criminal history. Russian hackers cyberattacked a voting software company and sent spear-phishing emails to local election officials, according to top secret NSA documents that resulted in federal charges against the papers' alleged leaker. The National Security Agency assesment published by The Intercept Monday said that operatives from Moscow’s GRU intelligence agency targeted employees at an electronic voting services vendor in August, and that at least one employee was likely compromised.

Hackers then used info from the company to target more than 100 local government email addresses by pretending to be from Florida-based VR Systems days before the election, according to the reported NSA documents. Just hours after the news broke, the Justice Department announced that Reality Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old who works at government contractor Pluribus International Corporation in Georgia, was charged with sending top secret information to an unidentified news outlet. The documents themselves shed new light on alleged interference efforts by Russia close to the election, with the disclosure itself saying the hacking "may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results."

VR Systems’ website lists California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia as states where their EViD software, which is used for election management tasks such as checking whether a voter is registered, operates. Phishing emails purportedly from VR Systems contained malicious Microsoft Word documents designed to give up control of a computer’s functions and “persistent access” to deliver more malware, the NSA report said. The intelligence report did not say whether those emails were successful in compromising local officials’ computers and systems.

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