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[0:00] Sally Horchow: Welcome to episode 13, Freedom of the Press Part 2.

[0:08] Dori Berinstein: With a world bearing witness to the terrorism of Vladimir Putin, it's essential to revisit the case against highly decorated NSA Air Force linguist Reality Winner.

[0:19] Sally Horchow: In 2017, Reality Winner was charged with leaking proof of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

[0:29] Dori Berinstein: A fact well documented in the Mueller Report.

[0:32] Sally Horchow: When Reality exposed that truth to the American public, it was embarrassing to Trump because it put his victory in question.

[0:39] Dori Berinstein: Calling Reality a terrorist and convicting her under the Espionage Act of 1917 was the Trump administration's way of saving face and burying the truth.

[0:50] Sally Horchow: Reality received the longest prison sentence ever imposed for the unauthorized release of government information.

[0:56] Dori Berinstein: Five years and three months.

[1:10] Sally Horchow: Reality had a singular goal to help protect democracy.

[1:15] Dori Berinstein: I'm Sally Horchow.

[1:16] Sally Horchow: And I'm Dori Berinstein.

[1:18] Dori Berinstein: And this is Reality.

[1:25] Sally Horchow: Last episode, we spoke with journalists Trevor Timm and Kevin Gosztola about how Reality's case highlights the reasons freedom of the press is essential to our democracy.

[1:36] Dori Berinstein: This episode will continue to explore how increasingly harsh prosecution of whistleblowers can silence important conversations about the state of our country.

[1:47] Sally Horchow: Trevor Timm, co-founder and the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and co-founder of Stand with Reality, explains how The Intercept mishandled the information leaked by Reality, leading to her swift arrest.

[2:01] Trevor Timm: The Intercept made some serious mistakes. They themselves have admitted in how they handled the documents that Reality had sent them and how they went about confirming those documents.

[2:17] Trevor Timm: But it's also a good lesson in the fact that it is very hard for whistleblowers to come forward without risk.

[2:28] Trevor Timm: One of the most fascinating parts of this case for those people who were tracking really closely was the very fine-tuned ability of the US government to now figure out exactly who is accessing exactly what document at exactly what time and in exactly what place.

[2:49] Trevor Timm: And so what this essentially means is that, you know, even if Reality or in a host of other cases, you know, essentially did everything perfectly on their side, and the news organizations did perfectly on their side as well, it means the government is still potentially able to figure out who these sources are.

[3:11] Trevor Timm: You know, so if you can imagine if there was, you know, a thousand suspects, you know, a thousand people who had access to this particular document, um, but that only three, the government can tell that only three people had accessed the document around the time period that a story came out.

[3:27] Trevor Timm: And the government's suspect pool shrinks very rapidly. While The Intercept made mistakes, which they've acknowledged, the truth is that the government has built up a system that makes it almost impossible for whistleblowers to come forward and for journalists to provide sufficient protection for their sources.

[3:48] Trevor Timm: And it is increasingly a very tough situation for sources and whistleblowers who, in many cases, feel the need to come forward to journalists because going through internal channels just won't work for one particular reason or another.

[4:06] Trevor Timm: And it ends up meaning that these brave people essentially have to throw away their livelihoods, in many ways their lives, to expose government wrongdoing.

[4:18] Trevor Timm: And it just shouldn't be that way. You know, there should be a way for these people, if they want to go this route, to be able to tell a jury that this was in the public interest and that this shouldn't be prosecuted.

[4:32] Trevor Timm: Well, the fact that the government spends billions of dollars a year attempting to root out the sources of journalists is, in my mind, quite disturbing when they could be spending that money on accountability.

[4:50] Kevin Gosztola: In Reality's case in particular, it can go very wrong. It can come out that even if that's not the reason why you get caught by the government, the journalists involved are responsible and play a role in making it easier for the government to unearth you as a source.

[5:13] Kevin Gosztola: And you never want that. You never want to be caught talking to a government official, giving them information that eventually helps them get to your source.

[5:14] Kevin Gosztola: You never want to inform on your source. You want to be on the side of your source as long as they're not hurting and doing something violent to other people.

[5:35] Kevin Gosztola: And you want to be careful about what kinds of information you share as far as copies of the records that might be passed on to you by a source because there are markings on these pages.

[5:49] Kevin Gosztola: That's what got Reality Winner in trouble is that they were able to see the markings on the page, and they were able to go so far as to connect it to the specific printer that Reality Winner used in order to take that document.

[6:03] Kevin Gosztola: And so journalists have to be very careful. The duty to their source is to make sure that they're taking steps that are not going to put their sources in a more vulnerable situation than they already are.

[6:20] Kevin Gosztola: You have to be realistic and you have to be upfront with your source and say, I think you should say, do you have a lawyer? You should have a lawyer before you talk with us. You should have somebody who's advised you on the risks that you're taking before you pass along this information.

[6:40] Kevin Gosztola: The system is essentially set up to catch whistleblowers, and those who do make the choice to come forward are doing so at immense personal risk.

[6:48] Kevin Gosztola: So you're really put in a position where you are going to prefer not to talk about what you did. And that's intentional because I don't think they want debate.

[6:58] Kevin Gosztola: The government has a way of whether it's Barack Obama or Donald Trump of insisting on national security and military matters, foreign policy matters, that they set the narrative, they set the spectrum of debate.

[7:16] Kevin Gosztola: They expect that the media, the establishment media or the mainstream media, however you want to view it, will have conversations within the spectrum of debate that they are willing to allow.

[7:28] Kevin Gosztola: You will hear from public officials that they are frustrated if the media is having a conversation they do not want to participate in.

[7:36] Kevin Gosztola: And so what happens is whistleblowers come forward and they force discussions on issues that are not being had.

[7:44] Kevin Gosztola: And that's why I find them to be so worthy of support, because so often you'll see officials in the White House for either party, depending on who's in control, working in tandem with people who are on cable news shows, working on Sunday morning television shows together to, you know, they claim that they're informing us about what's happening in the world.

[8:10] Kevin Gosztola: And then a whistleblower comes forward and immediately they want to push that person aside or attack that messenger because that person wants to have a different discussion than they're having.

[8:22] Dori Berinstein: As we learned in the previous episode, how much power a person holds in Washington, DC is the deciding factor in the severity of their prosecution.

[8:33] Sally Horchow: People like Reality Winner get punished because they're just a contractor working for the NSA.

[8:42] Dori Berinstein: And obviously, if they wanted to come forward and share their experience and allege corruption and wrongdoing, they're gonna have a difficult time going to an inspector general.

[8:55] Sally Horchow: They're going to have a difficult time going to Congress, getting somebody who's a leader of a committee, let's say an intelligence committee or an armed services committee or foreign affairs committee, they're going to have a difficult time calling up The New York Times or Washington Post and convincing them that they're in a position to know what is happening.

[9:19] Dori Berinstein: People are going to doubt them as to whether they're credible sources because of their position.

[9:24] Kevin Gosztola: Those who are high ranking, those are the ones that get away with being able to leak. And they're able to abuse their position in order to take advantage of their access to state secrets in a way that you don't normally see lower level people do.

[9:44] Kevin Gosztola: For me, Reality's case is just one more example of a larger cultural issue within the government that has collectively made whistleblowers and journalists the enemy, regardless of who controls the White House.

[10:32] Kevin Gosztola: If it is true that Donald Trump was doing something extraordinary to Reality Winner, then we only have to find a way to correct a small group of people and remove them.

[10:46] Kevin Gosztola: The excessive prosecution of whistleblowers is much greater than the treatment by one administration.

[10:53] Kevin Gosztola: It's actually endemic to how our government operates.

[10:57] Kevin Gosztola: But if it's a cultural issue within government, and if basically across the board, no matter who they want running the White House, they are inclined to crush and crack down on whistleblowers, then we have a harsh problem.

[11:14] Trevor Timm: We have something that we really have to fix.

[11:28] Trevor Timm: There are these so-called third rail subjects in which you're not allowed to touch if you are working in government. And if you do, then you're immediately going to be known.

[11:53] Trevor Timm: And so I think that, by and large, you couldn't spend time on why Donald Trump wanted to make sure that Reality Winner was convicted and sent to prison. Although I would quibble with that just a little bit and say you can understand why Jeff Sessions, when he was attorney general, was not willing to show mercy to Reality Winner and let her go to, let's say, have probation and maybe just never work as a contractor for whoever she was hired to work for ever again.

[12:30] Trevor Timm: And you can see why Bill Barr wouldn't show her any mercy and make sure that during a pandemic, she's not allowed compassionate release from prison, even though she's making a representation that she's vulnerable because of a lung condition or whatever she's suffering from. And to me, it fits into a timeline that I've been able to cover from 20 going before 2010 all the way up to now that just shows this intensity in which just the Justice Department is willing to keep shipping away at whatever ability people have in government to defend themselves if they want to be sources for journalists.

[13:25] Trevor Timm: In recent months, with the growing conflict in Ukraine, it has become clear why the Trump administration has wanted to bury any evidence of Russian interference in the election. Reality's lawyer Alison Grinter Allen explains how both are connected.

[13:41] Alison Grinter Allen: I think that the Trump-Putin collaborative was the driving force behind Reality's prosecution and Reality's treatment. And the message that it sent was really the intended message, and that is do not step out of line, don't call your leaders to account, and don't say anything about government collusion with this Russian interference.

[14:12] Alison Grinter Allen: And that's why I think a really, really swift change of course is necessary because if people are going to be emboldened to call out really un-American behavior when they see it, if people are going to be emboldened to tell the American people the truth because the American people deserve it, I think they know, whistleblowers know, people who are going to do that know that there's going to be problems on the outset. Whenever you speak truth to power, there are problems. But in order for the truth to win out, it has to win out quickly.

[14:48] Alison Grinter Allen: We need to see it happen immediately if it's going to be seen as a correction. So this can't be a historical footnote. It has to be a very current and very strong and unambiguous statement. And it's really, really important to call it out and to be unwavering about it. And we're seeing these manipulative lies and these tactics spill over into countries that aren't us and aren't Ukraine. I mean, we're seeing Hungary's government destabilized by whether fealty to Putin or democracy is going to be the defining ethos in Hungary, too.

[15:14] Alison Grinter Allen: I mean, we're seeing this sort of crisis of foreign policy morality really happen all over the developed world. The rule of law is really, really inconvenient for powerful kleptocrats. And it always, always will be. And it used to be much easier to see agenda maneuvers like this for what they were, but Putin has this way of co-opting this populist rhetoric that really makes authoritarianism shinier, look more popular and look more legitimate. And that's really scary because the mechanisms by which we decide whether government or any kind of political action is legitimate is democracy and is the rule of law. Without that, we're in really tough shape.

[16:31] Kevin Gosztola: So I'm gonna give you a complex answer simply because I also believe that the players in this are also existent on the Western side in the US and Europe, and that they engage in a fair amount of cyber warfare as well. And so I think what Reality Winner points to, if there's any lesson to take away, is the fragility of democracy if you have global powers that are fighting each other. And if there's a message, it is that we have to find some way to coexist, because you can't have democracies where the United States is meddling in democratic elections in another country, and you can't have peace if Russia is meddling in elections in another country or China is meddling in elections in another country, and you have to find some way to set some kind of boundaries on what is allowed, which we don't have a public debate about.

[17:37] Kevin Gosztola: We don't know this whole idea of being able to fight wars in cyberspace is a relatively new concept. For the most part, in all of human history, wars were fought in meat space, for lack of a better word. You know, if it actual people in on the ground, deployed, whether it was through the air or on the ground, people weren't doing it by way of electronic or digital transmission and trying to disrupt the infrastructure of countries trying to undermine the ability of people to exercise their will and elect who they wanted to represent them.

[18:19] Kevin Gosztola: You know, there's been focus on the ability of Russia to spread propaganda, but the US has a lot of control over the information that it shares and spreads within the media as well. And so I think, you know, what I take away from Reality Winner and coming forward is one, it's a message of if an official is going to come forward and make claims about what they did or did not do in an election, and you think that you see something that shows that they are lying, then you have an obligation to come forward and tell people that it doesn't match.

[19:02] Kevin Gosztola: So if Donald Trump's going around and saying that, well, I don't think it's possible that Russia could have hacked the election, but then you have a report that is in front of you that suggests differently, then you feel motivated to put it out there so that people can see that, you know, Donald Trump shouldn't be so confident that there weren't really any issues, that the government agencies weren't concerned, that they weren't linking certain actions back to a foreign power. But on the other hand, I think it also points to the need for us to have more open debate about how far we want this to go as far as cyber warfare, because we start to get into things that are really, really scary.

[19:56] Alison Grinter Allen: I think that for a very long time, the United States has tread really carefully around what the Russian regime might think. And our messaging has been really cautious, and we've not wanted to upset anybody. And I think that the tide has shifted. I mean, Biden has come out and demanded prosecutions for war crimes and the genocide that we've seen in the streets of Ukraine. We can continue that messaging, and we can continue and stand really firmly against Russian interference, not only in Ukraine, but here. And part of that should be a very strong statement with a pardon for Reality Winner and for those that told the truth about Russian interference.

[20:57] Trevor Timm: Please join us for the next episode of This Is Reality, and make sure to check out all the podcasts on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[21:05] Trevor Timm: We're incredibly grateful to our special guests, Trevor Timm, Kevin Gosztola, and Alison Grinter Allen. Reality's interrogation by the FBI was captured in the critically acclaimed Broadway show, Is This a Room, conceived and directed by Tina Satter.

[21:20] Trevor Timm: This podcast is created, written, and produced by Dori Berinstein, Sally Horchow, Rebecca Aparicio, and the Broadway Podcast Network. Sound engineers are Alan Seals and Kimberly Garris. Podcast editor is Alan Seals. Executive producer is Liz Armstrong.

[21:38] Trevor Timm: This is Reality is part of the Gotham's Fiscal Sponsorship Program under the Sound and Light Project. Please join us for our next episode of This Is Reality by following and finding out more information on BPN.fm/ThisIsReality.

[21:54] Trevor Timm: And finally, special thanks to Bea Westby and the rest of the team at the Broadway Podcast Network.