Reality Winner's Mom Says Daughter Got COVID-19 As Convicted Trump Aides Went Free
Reality Winner’s mom is blasting the fact that felons who worked for President Donald Trump are free while her daughter is still behind bars and caught COVID-19.
Winner, 29, was sentenced in 2018 to five years in federal prison for leaking a classified National Security Agency document to the media that exposed Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The former US Air Force linguist and intelligence specialist who worked as an NSA contractor was denied compassionate release from a Texas medical prison in April. She tested positive for the coronavirus last month, along with at least 510 female inmates at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth. The facility has one of the largest COVID-19 outbreaks in the nation, with some 40% of the prison population infected.
Winner appears to be doing better now after suffering significant pain from the virus, her mom, Billie Winner-Davis, told HuffPost in an interview Wednesday.
Winner-Davis called her daughter’s treatment “cruel” and “vindictive” in contrast to former Trump aides who sparked national security concerns over their links to Russia and have since been released from prison or have avoided it altogether.
“They didn’t want that information out there; they wanted to set an example to others,” she said of the White House’s interest in keeping her daughter behind bars.
“This has really opened my eyes to how very corrupt our government is, and it’s way worse under Trump,” she told HuffPost.
Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who owed at much as $17 million to pro-Russian interests while working on the campaign, was released in May to home confinement to serve out his 7.5-year sentence because of the risks of COVID-19 in prison. He served less than 30% of his sentence for conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion behind bars.
The US Department of Justice is also currently battling to dismiss a case against Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn,...
