Pardon Reality Winner
https://www.washingtonpost.com...m_term=.32d4b4694816
Reality Winner, a former National Security Agency contractor who was jailed for leaking a classified document about Russian interference in the 2016 elections, thanked President Trump on Thursday for calling her punishment “so unfair.”
Winner, 26, was sentenced last week to more than five years in prison for the leak, with an additional three years of supervised release, the longest sentence given to someone for such a crime, her attorneys said. She is the first person to be charged under the Espionage Act during the Trump administration.
In an interview Thursday with “CBS This Morning,” Winner told host Norah O’Donnell from a Georgia county jail she “deeply” regrets having leaked the report to the media and appreciated Trump for verbalizing what she and her family had not been able to for more than a year.
“You know, even our commander in chief, President Trump, has kind of come out and said, ‘Wait a minute, this is really unfair, there’s this double standard here,’ " Winner told O’Donnell. “And for that I can’t thank him enough because for 16 months those words ‘so unfair’ were actually not allowed by myself or my team or my family to say out in the public.”
Trump, on Friday, tweeted Winner’s case was “small potatoes” and suggested it did not merit the 63-month jail sentence she had received.
“So unfair Jeff, Double Standard,” Trump tweeted, calling out Attorney General Jeff Sessions, with whom the president has been increasingly at odds.