By Jonathan S. Tobin
Thursday, June 08, 2017
Efforts to portray the NSA leaker as a victim as well as
a punchline on late-night television won’t wash. She’s just an impotent
criminal who deserves to be prosecuted.
When the name of the first person to be prosecuted for
leaking national secrets during the Trump administration was released, the
late-night comics pounced. Reality Leigh Winner is the name of the 25-year-old
contractor for the National Security Agency who is accused of leaking a
classified document about Russian hacking to the press. But rather than mock
the Air Force vet with the odd name and poor spycraft skills, the comedians
employed her as yet another club with which to beat their favorite target:
President Donald Trump.
According to Stephen Colbert, the only conclusion to draw
from the story was that Trump “is at war with Reality.” Even the more
apolitical Jimmy Fallon couldn’t resist cracking that Trump “wasn’t in contact
with Reality.” Hysterical.
But even as the professional kibitzers are mining the
story for all the puns they can find to pound Trump, a narrative about the
leaker is emerging that is more significant than the question of which of the
late-night jokes go viral. When it comes to stealing and leaking classified
information, Reality Winner may be a rank amateur when compared to someone like
Edward Snowden, who turned this kind of theft into an art form. But the
emerging effort to paint her as a sympathetic character in the mainstream media
has little to do with any concern about her fate and everything to do with the
campaign to undermine Trump and to relitigate the 2016 election.
The stories about Winner make her sound like an
all-American girl. She served in the U.S. Air Force and subsequently parlayed
knowledge of various Asian languages into a post-service job as contractor for
the NSA. When not working at a job that required a top-secret security
clearance, she taught yoga and posted pictures of cats and favorite quotes on
social media.
The upshot of these biographical details points to what
is likely to be her defense in the court of public opinion if not in a court of
law. We’ll be told Winner is a patriot whose leaking was motivated by the same
spirit of public service that led her to join the military. Giving up a
classified report about Russian hacking will be portrayed as an effort to get
the truth to the American people. And unlike Snowden, whose massive downloads
undoubtedly did more damage to U.S. security but who remains in a comfortable
Russian exile, Winner is currently sitting in a Georgia jail cell paying the
price he evaded with his sophisticated methods and clever escape plan.
Some are already also criticizing The Intercept, the publication that received the document Winner
leaked, for its role in unmasking her identity. Apparently it sought to vet the
document with the government, and that yielded up clues that betrayed Winner as
the culprit. But even if that is true, her effort was so clumsy that it appears
investigators would have easily identified her even if the magazine had said
nothing.
But as Winner’s Twitter feed showed before she shut it
down after starting at the NSA earlier this year, she is a fierce left-wing
partisan, not a high-minded defender of national security. Winner is a vicious
critic of Trump and a supporter of Black Lives Matter. But she’s also a
defender of Iran’s government and pledged to “stand with” Tehran in the event
of conflict with the U.S. While there is nothing illegal about calling Trump “the
orange fascist we let into the White House” or Attorney General Jeff Sessions a
“Confederate,” her motivation for leaking was about far-left politics, not
blowing the whistle on some government wrongdoing.
Winner and those who share her view that Trump should be
thrown out of office have every right to their opinions. But dissatisfaction
with the outcome of elections is not a license to break the law. Nor is it a
form of political persecution to hold a government employee accountable for
violating her oath. That’s something we’re going to need to remember as the
case against Winner proceeds at the same time Trump is under siege for his
firing of FBI director James Comey amid the ongoing controversy about the
Russia-collusion investigation.
It’s one thing when the loyal opposition in a democracy
morphs into a “resistance” determined to damn the government and its leader
under any and all circumstances. That’s a regrettable development, but its
growth is the fault of Trump’s unorthodox behavior and statements and the
chaotic circus in the West Wing since he took office as much as it is
malevolent intent by the Left. But if those opposed to Trump embrace criminal
acts such as the one Winner is charged with committing, it’s more than yet
another breach of civility in a political culture that has already gone
haywire. It will be a sign that the liberal resistance against Trump is seeking
to erase a line that should never be approached, let alone crossed.
Every nation has a right and a duty to protect its national-security
secrets. Disagreement with the policies of the government or the outcome of
elections is not an excuse for violating laws that are in place to ensure that
those secrets are protected. It doesn’t matter that Winner may seem to some to
be a more attractive character than Trump or whether, like her, you think ill
of the president. While no one seriously disputes that the Russians tried to
intervene in 2016, any effort to use her leak to bolster the preposterous claim
that the Russians somehow stole the election for Trump will do as much if not
more to undermine democracy than anything Vladimir Putin has done.
Repairing the damage done to the fabric of our civic
culture, which has been torn apart both by Trump and the “resistance,” won’t be
easy. But it must start with a bipartisan consensus that Winner’s alleged
actions were beyond the pale and deserve severe punishment. Anything less on
the part of liberal critics of Trump will be a blow to the rule of law and
cannot be tolerated.
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