Jailed NSA Whistleblower Reality Winner Tests Positive for COVID-19

National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner, convicted in 2018 of leaking a top-secret report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, tested positive for COVID-19 in the Texas Federal prison where she's serving a five-year term.

The British newspaper The Guardian reported the finding and was told by her sister, Brittany, that “Reality is concerned that she is going to die in there,” her case overshadowed by that of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, jailed in London and fighting extradition to the United States where he would face espionage charges.

Winner, 28, told relatives that more than 500 inmates at FMC Carswell, a women’s prison in Fort Worth, had contracted the virus.

“Now she is concerned that she is going to get sick and they are not going to be able to do anything to help her,” her sister said, after two inmates had died in the prison which has been criticized for unsanitary conditions.

Dallas civil rights attorney Alison Grinter told the paper that inmates “are all sitting together in a concrete room facing the real possibility of dying hundreds of miles away from their family. That is a shared experience that is terrifying.”

Grinter said Winner is “medically vulnerable” because she suffers from bronchial problems and has struggled with bulimia and that she said guards are mocking the infected inmates.

“The officer went out of her way to come to my room and say, ‘I just wanted to congratulate you on your positive results,” she wrote her sister.

Winner was the first person charged under the Espionage Act by the Trump Administration which wants to prosecute Assange for leaks of secret records he said showed US war crimes.

Winner was working as an analyst with a defense contractor when she printed classified documents that allegedly revealed that Russia had hacked into US voting software prior to the election, giving Trump an advantage and likely the election.

Winner, who worked in the US Air Force's drone program, is serving the longest sentence ever given to a journalistic source by a federal court, according to the Department of Justice and has been barred from talking to journalists.

"She has been warned and she has been frightened as far as the restrictions on her communications," her mother Billie Winner-Davis told CNN in May, 2019. "They're telling her she cannot even have any contact with any kind of journalists or media, in any way, shape, or form,” with permission denied.