This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Dori Berinstein: Welcome to episode three.

[0:02] Sally Horchow: See something.

[0:04] Dori Berinstein: Say something.

[0:09] Dori Berinstein: I'm Dori Berinstein.

[0:11] Sally Horchow: And I'm Sally Horchow, and we are the producers of Is This a Room on Broadway.

[0:16] Dori Berinstein: On June 3, 2017, 11 FBI agents appeared at the home of Reality Winner, a 25-year-old Air Force linguist, to interrogate her about leaking a classified document proving Russian interference in the 2016 election.

[0:33] Dori Berinstein: Is This a Room, the critically acclaimed Broadway play, reenacts the verbatim transcript of that interrogation.

[0:40] Sally Horchow: When we started the journey of bringing Is This a Room to Broadway, we knew there was so much the public didn't know about Reality's story.

[0:48] Dori Berinstein: So we created the podcast, This is Reality, to provide a deeper look inside the very important and very timely story of Reality Winner.

[0:57] Sally Horchow: In the past two episodes, we've learned about Reality Winner's arrest for leaking classified documents and who she was leading up to those events in May of 2017.

[1:07] Dori Berinstein: In today's episode, we look at the series of events that came after the interrogation, which made Reality the most prosecuted leaker of all time.

[1:21] Sally Horchow: To fully understand the lengths the prosecution went to to secure Reality Winner's conviction, it's important to examine the political climate at the time Reality leaked the document, proving Russian interference in the 2016 election.

[1:36] Dori Berinstein: The date printed on the document, sent to the Intercept, was May 9, 2017.

[1:42] Dori Berinstein: This was the same day James Comey, FBI director, was fired.

[1:47] Dori Berinstein: James Comey had just launched the investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election.

[1:54] Dori Berinstein: We begin with that bombshell from the White House late today.

[1:57] Dori Berinstein: FBI director James Comey fired by President Trump.

[2:00] Dori Berinstein: It came without warning.

[2:02] Dori Berinstein: Just last week, Comey testifying about the FBI's investigation into Russia's meddling in the U.S.

[2:07] Dori Berinstein: election.

[2:09] Dori Berinstein: Reality's lawyer Allison Grinter Allen explains what the political climate was like back in 2017.

[2:15] Allison Grinter Allen: When Jim Comey was fired, he was just beginning the counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the election.

[2:27] Allison Grinter Allen: Russian interference was starting to be taken very seriously by the Justice Department.

[2:34] Allison Grinter Allen: Not, however, so seriously as it became after he was fired.

[2:56] Allison Grinter Allen: Firing an FBI director is a major situation.

[3:00] Allison Grinter Allen: And firing an FBI director in order to influence and shut down investigations is a serious breach of the rule of law.

[3:15] Allison Grinter Allen: It put everybody on really alarming notice that this president was not only willing to politicize the Justice Department, but was really eager to do it.

[3:30] Allison Grinter Allen: Turning point for Reality.

[3:32] Allison Grinter Allen: I think it prompted her to understand that this president was going to do absolutely everything in his power to silence this information.

[3:46] Allison Grinter Allen: I think it made her understand that the extent of Russian interference was something that the president was all too interested in allowing to die on the vine, for that truth to never come out.

[3:59] Allison Grinter Allen: And I think that that sent alarm bells off in her head.

[4:02] Allison Grinter Allen: We don't know what's happening and how threatened our elections and our democracy really are.

[4:09] Allison Grinter Allen: And that's why she took action.

[4:12] Allison Grinter Allen: She was never interested in having her name associated with it.

[4:18] Allison Grinter Allen: She just wanted the public to know.

[4:20] Allison Grinter Allen: And it's interesting because this particular information was already in the public sphere.

[4:28] Allison Grinter Allen: President Obama says the decision to impose these new sanctions on Russia came after repeated warnings to the country to stop hacking computer systems in an effort to try and influence the presidential election.

[4:39] Allison Grinter Allen: Obama had released an intelligence assessment at the very end of his presidency that was supposed to alert intelligence communities and the public to what the great threats were.

[4:54] Allison Grinter Allen: It was almost immediately buried by the incoming president.

[4:58] Allison Grinter Allen: And there's a real question as to when this exact information became top secret and why.

[5:23] Dori Berinstein: Journalist Carrie Howley wrote the New York Magazine article, which inspired the Broadway play, Is This a Room?

[5:29] Dori Berinstein: She expands on this issue.

[5:30] Carrie Howley: There's a massive overclassification problem.

[5:34] Carrie Howley: If the set of information that was classified was the set of information that actually needs to be classified.

[5:40] Carrie Howley: So it creates all of this anxiety in the bureaucracy that essentially everything they do all day is classified, right?

[5:48] Carrie Howley: That's a very insecure situation in which you have all of this information that's considered equally dangerous when most of it is just nonsense that nobody cares about.

[5:58] Carrie Howley: And this issue of overclassification is not in the least controversial.

[6:02] Carrie Howley: I mean, everybody on every side of the spectrum agrees that there's a problem with overclassification.

[6:07] Carrie Howley: And so you have this vast web of secrets that's very vulnerable to puncture because it's touching so many different people.

[6:15] Carrie Howley: So in May 2017, we have a president denying any Russian interference whatsoever in the 2016 election.

[6:25] Carrie Howley: And we have an FBI director who has abruptly been fired for investigating and leading the Bureau's investigation into that exact Russian interference.

[6:36] Carrie Howley: Further, we have a massive U.S. surveillance system established after 9/11, and a generation of young people with a heightened sense of civic duty.

[6:45] Carrie Howley: In fact, we have all been told over and over that we all must be on the lookout for potential terrorist activity.

[6:53] Carrie Howley: See something, say something.

[6:56] Carrie Howley: So, as an NSA employee with access to vast amounts of secret data and communications, Reality Winner saw something.

[7:05] Carrie Howley: And understandably, she felt she had the civic duty to say something.

[7:11] Allison Grinter Allen: When you train people to know and understand that they can be of service to their country and that their country needs them.

[7:21] Allison Grinter Allen: When you grow a generation of smart and empathetic folks who want to serve their country and take their oaths to the Constitution seriously, you're bound to get some whistleblowers because our country is the land and people of the United States.

[7:42] Allison Grinter Allen: It's not a flag, it's not a picture, it's not an idea, and it's not just the government.

[7:49] Allison Grinter Allen: It's the people and their rights to govern themselves.

[7:54] Allison Grinter Allen: Under the Obama administration, we saw the first use of the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute controversial whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.

[8:04] Allison Grinter Allen: It's important to note because without this precedent, Reality would not have been sentenced to 63 months in federal prison.

[8:10] Allison Grinter Allen: She would have been given a far less serious charge.

[8:14] Allison Grinter Allen: In the Obama administration, leaks to the press began to be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917.

[8:24] Allison Grinter Allen: Previous to that, it was sort of an open question whether the public would tolerate prosecuting leaking under the Espionage Act.

[8:33] Allison Grinter Allen: It fits the definition, but the Obama administration laid a fairly solid precedent that, yeah, the public will tolerate treating press leaks like stealing troop movements.

[8:46] Allison Grinter Allen: And the Espionage Act of 1917 created a crime for stealing top secret information, and it was intended to punish folks who did just that.

[9:00] Allison Grinter Allen: And it created a unique legal situation surrounding that.

[9:05] Allison Grinter Allen: People who disclose this information that in and of itself is so dangerous that it cannot be talked about cannot say as a defense why they did it, cannot use an appeal to empathy or anything like that as a defense.

[9:23] Allison Grinter Allen: And that was meaningful because the folks who would betray state secrets and give them to the enemy do so almost always under tremendous duress.

[9:36] Allison Grinter Allen: But frankly, that duress just doesn't matter.

[9:39] Allison Grinter Allen: I mean, if you're gonna give up secrets that would put U.S. troops or the United States' territorial security under threat, it really doesn't matter why you did it.

[9:55] Allison Grinter Allen: That's still gonna be a crime.

[9:58] Allison Grinter Allen: And those secrets can't really be talked about in open court because you want to minimize that harm.

[10:05] Dori Berinstein: Reality's mother Billy describes the government's charges against Reality.

[10:09] Billy Winner: So Reality was charged with unlawful retention and transmission of classified information, which was a charge under the Espionage Act.

[10:21] Billy Winner: And it was a single charge, just one charge.

[10:25] Billy Winner: The government had nothing else on her.

[10:30] Brittany Winner: Reality's sister Brittany explains how the charge under the Espionage Act made it extremely difficult to advocate for Reality. The only question that's pertinent to figuring out guilt or innocence in somebody who is charged under the Espionage Act is whether they did it or not. Whether someone with a security clearance passed on information to somebody else who didn't have a security clearance. And so, in such black and white terms, there's no allowance for mitigating factors like why Reality did it or what the information even was. Because they charged Reality with the Espionage Act, they could insinuate that this information cannot get out, or else it's grave danger to the United States of America.

And anybody sitting in that court would think who would do that? Who would reveal classified information that could harm the United States? They must be a spy, or they must really hate their country, or they must, you know, XYZ. And that's the kind of characterization that Reality faced in the media. She claimed to hate America. When I asked, you don't really hate America, right? She responded, I mean, yeah, I do. It's literally the worst thing to happen on the planet. Which was completely untrue because if Reality hated her country, maybe she would have just left or gone on something, or you know, just she wouldn't have served it so faithfully. She wouldn't care about it enough to try to fix it, try to help it.

Reality loves America, and that's why she released the document because she believed that the American public needed to know that people were lying. And people don't like to be lied to, and they shouldn't be lied to, especially by their own government. I mean, we pay taxes, we believe that they should have our best interest in mind, and our best interest is not to be lied to about something that is so easily proven. And that's what Reality did. She proved, she released evidence, hard evidence from our own intelligence agencies that Russia attempted to hack the 2016 presidential election. That's what America needs. That's what makes America better.

[10:31] Billy Winner: Reality's mother Billy explains how the charge under the Espionage Act gave the court permission to deny Reality bail when she was arrested. Last Thursday, a federal judge denied a second request for bail for Reality Winner, the former NSA National Security Advisor contractor who is accused of violating the Espionage Act. I had no reason whatsoever to ever believe that they would deny her bail. There's just no reason, you know, why Reality Winner didn't deserve to have a bond and to be out on bail, you know, pending her trial. She wasn't a flight risk. They took her passport. Thirty thousand dollars is not gonna go far when you don't have a passport and you don't know how to hide. You know, she's never lived in a criminal environment in her life, you know.

And you know, I just felt like her service to our country would mean something. Her service to all of her, the communities that she lived in would mean something. And what the government did was they took pieces of her life and they just twisted them to make her look like she was a terrorist. Federal judge Brian Epps of Augusta, Georgia said his decision to deny bail was based in part on social media comments by Winner that she quote admires Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. It's things like a friend of hers had sent her a book and they found it in her house, and it was how to talk peacefully to the Taliban. The fact that she would get up in the morning and she would listen to the news from sources like Al Jazeera and Afghanistan reporters because she really wanted to hear what was happening there. You know, they used that against her and said that, you know, for all we know, she could join the Taliban. I mean, that was furthest from the truth.

[15:08] Brittany Winner: For Brittany, seeing the way the government handled the prosecution of her sister really changed the way she viewed our government. We have this illusion, I think, in the United States of America that we have free speech and that we can say whatever we want and the government won't come after us. And I think, you know, codified in law, that's true, but they can use it, they can totally use it against you. They can use your social media posts against you, they can use your private diary entries against you. And I was talking to Reality recently about something, you know, related to this, and it and she said they convicted me of a thought crime before they even tried me for a real crime. And I was like, that is so true.

And not even just in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion, on the news, talking about some of the jokes that she and I had made on our phone conversations, something about, you know, making people feel sorry for her, you know, she could just cry, whatever. Like, these are the kind of things that we were just trying to make ourselves feel better about. And then with her diary entries, I mean, anybody who's ever had a diary who writes profusely, like you do not expect that the government is going to come in and use that and publish it. And there are still excerpts of that on Reality's Wikipedia page, which is horrific and horrendous. And it's still shaping people's public perceptions of Reality.

And of course, they're completely out of context. They're completely without Reality explaining them because she hasn't had a chance because she was silenced for four years while she was locked up. And so they the media assassinated Reality's character for a headline and for kind of a villainization of her, even before she stepped foot in court to determine whether she was innocent or guilty.

[17:04] Brittany Winner: The Espionage Act, of course, is not something that's defensible against at all. So, you know, who knows if it really would have mattered, but it mattered to me because I know that Reality is not that person that they were portraying. Calling somebody an orange fascist is not a crime. I've seen much worse on my Twitter feed, you know, even today. And these people would never expect that that could be used against them, could be used to keep them in jail without bail, without bond. And so it's just it's the this whole ordeal with Reality, especially early on, just shocked me and opened my eyes to the fact that we really do think we're free, and we're not. We're not free to express ourselves. And I think that that disappointment in what America is supposed to stand for is something that is always going to be with me.

[17:58] Billy Winner: Billy agrees. This experience was also life-changing for her. I always thought that America was better than this, but this whole experience has taught me that it's all about power, and it's all about who you know. You know, when people who actually have worked against our country are walking free today, General Flynn, who you know lied to the FBI. My daughter didn't lie to the FBI, as you know, you know, as you are making sure that America knows that she didn't lie to the FBI. She came clean with what she did. And she was actually the good person. She was the good guy. She was the one that was telling us that we were under attack. She wasn't the one who was having private conversations with the Russians, or setting up back channels, or you know, giving them information. You know, it's just crazy. This is absolutely a crazy world that we live in.

[19:02] Dori Berinstein: In our next episode, we will dig deeper into the legal challenges of the Espionage Act that made it impossible for Reality to mount a defense. You can support Reality by signing her petition for clemency at standwithreality.org. Please join us for the next episode of This Is Reality. And for more information and tickets to all productions of Is This a Room, visit BPN.fm slash This Is Reality. And make sure to check out all the podcasts on the Broadway Podcast Network. We're tremendously grateful to our very special guests Billy Jean Winner Davis, Brittany Winner, Allison Grinter Allen, and Carrie Howley. We're also very grateful to the Is This a Room cast, Emily Davis, Becca Blackwell, Will Cobbs, and Pete Simpson, and the entire Is This A Room Company.

This podcast is created, written, and produced by Dori Berinstein, Sally Horchow, Rebecca Aparicio, and the Broadway Podcast Network. Sound engineers are Alan Seales and Kimberly Garris. Podcast editor is Alan Seales. Executive producer is Liz Armstrong. This is Reality is part of the Gotham's Fiscal Sponsorship Program under the Sound and Light Project. Lead producers of Is This a Room on Broadway are Dori Berinstein, Sally Horchow, and Matt Ross. Please join us for our next episode of This Is Reality by following and finding out more information on BPN.fm slash This Is Reality. And finally, special thanks to Bea Westby, Katie Rosen, Ayana Prescott, and the rest of the team at the Broadway Podcast Network.