When Reality Winner got out of the US air force last December, she was despondent.
The 25-year-old vegan yoga enthusiast, who enjoyed adopting abandoned pets and sending shoeboxes full of gifts to Afghan children, was repulsed by the US president-elect, her polar opposite.
A passionate environmentalist, Winner grew heavy-hearted as Donald Trump quickly gave the go-ahead for construction of the controversial Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines.
“I’m losing my mind,” she wrote in a Facebook post on 9 February. “He’s lying. He’s blatantly lying.”
Four days later, Winner arrived for her first day of work as a contractor at Trump’s NSA.
The Trump administration now alleges that Winner used that job, at the NSA’s campus in Augusta, Georgia, to take and leak a top-secret document on Russia’s alleged efforts to swing the presidential election in his favour.
The document was the basis of a report published by the Intercept just an hour before Winner’s prosecution was announced on Monday afternoon by Rod Rosenstein, Trump’s deputy attorney general.
According to court filings, Winner admitted to FBI agents that she printed out the classified report on 9 May and then mailed it to reporters at the online news outlet, which focuses on national security. She was arrested and detained after appearing in a federal courtroom on Monday afternoon.
The first person to be charged by the young administration with violating the Espionage Act, Winner now faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted. “It is a very unfortunate scene,” her friend and yoga instructor, Keith Golden, told the Guardian on Tuesday.
Winner is an idealist, according to friends and family, and was moved to sign up for the US military primarily by a desire to help the people of Afghanistan who have been caught up in her country’s long war there.
“I’ve never met someone so committed to helping others,” said Golden.
“She’s a beautiful girl,” said her mother, Billie Winner-Davis. “Everyone who meets her loves her, and she’s kind.”
Winner was born in Texas in December 1991. Her parents divorced when she was seven. She was raised in Kingsville, a small city in the south of the state, and attended HM King high school, where she was known as a formidable athlete. Her tennis playing made the local newspaper.
A few months after graduating from school, she joined the air force. According to her service record, Winner climbed to the rank of senior airman and worked at Fort Meade in Maryland as a cryptologic language analyst, listening in on intercepted foreign chatter to provide US forces with intelligence. She was awarded the air force commendation medal.
She became proficient in Farsi, Dari and Pashto, according to her mother. Friends said that she was passionate about her work and saw it as integral to efforts against violent extremism.
“She is obsessed with the fight against Islamic State,” said Golden. “She said the problem was rampant – worse than people were aware of or what the media reported.” When a Jordanian pilot was filmed being burned to death by terrorists in February 2015, she emailed friends in despair about the world.
Winner’s spare time has for several years been occupied by the gym. She is a dedicated weightlifter and in recent months has taught yoga at Underbox and Oh Yeah Yoga in Augusta, having completed a 200-hour training certificate.
Exercise has also helped her work through personal problems. In an Instagram post in February, Winner said her body image had “done a complete 180” over the past two years following a downbeat period and that she had struggled with “an eating disorder largely based off of OCD”.
Winner also became increasingly devoted to animals. In March 2015, she adopted Mina, a black cat, from a shelter in Ellicott City, Maryland, and joked that the creature was her best friend and an ideal partner for movie-watching. Mina was later joined at Winner’s home by Dom, a rescue dog. When she called her family after being arrested at the weekend, her first concern was for the pets.
She once rescued an injured honeybee found outside her house, according to a friend.
At heart a hippy befitting her eccentric name, Winner is fascinated by faith and devours literature on spirituality. She is a fan of Doctor Who, the British mystery television series that has won a cult following in the US.
Winner’s anxiety about the environment intensified during last year’s presidential campaign as the Republican nominee promised to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, reopen Appalachian coal mines and dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency. Then, shocking the world, Trump won and got to work.
“It was clear that she would have preferred a different president than who ended up winning,” said Golden. Winner thought a controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was overblown by the media and railed against “ignorant Americans” who took Trump at his word.
While Winner has been derided by rightwing critics as a “social justice warrior” cliche, in fact her politics are more unconventional. “Liking” tweets by the Green party candidate Jill Stein, she also listened to the podcast of Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning former Republican presidential candidate.
Whether brave or reckless, her alleged act took her relatives by surprise. “I never thought this would be something she would do,” said her mother. “She has expressed to me that she is not a fan of Trump – but she’s not someone who would go and riot or picket.”
Winner’s arrest was put in motion last Tuesday. As she arrived home in Augusta from a short and sunny break in Belize, a journalist from the Intercept contacted the NSA to say they had obtained the leaked intelligence report – and agreed to send the agency a copy for verification.
As the FBI was being called in, NSA officials also heard from an employee of Pluribus International, the private intelligence firm that was contracting Winner to the agency. The employee said he or she had also been contacted about the leak by an Intercept journalist.
A visible crease in the document told officials that the Intercept must have received a hard copy in the mail, according to prosecutors. The Pluribus employee said the Intercept journalist confirmed this, and had even volunteered that the envelope was postmarked to Augusta, where Winner lived.
Information security analysts also pointed out that the printout handed to the NSA by the Intercept appeared to feature a unique microdot pattern, a security feature intended to allow the document’s owner to keep track of precisely when and where it was printed.
Investigators reviewed a log of who had printed the file. Six names, including Winner’s, showed up. A search of Winner’s computer system also allegedly turned up two emails that she had previously sent to the Intercept from her personal account about a podcast published by the site. Investigators had their target.
On Saturday, Judge Brian Epps approved an application for a search warrant from an FBI special agent, Justin Garrick. Court filings said agents would scour the standalone red-brick house on Battle Row that Winner was renting for $550 a month. They would also look through her light-coloured Nissan Cube car.
The paperwork authorized FBI agents to seize property such as financial records and computers, along with material “relevant to a motive” for the alleged leak that could be used against her by prosecutors. Among the examples given were “anti-government statements”.