Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) doesn’t want leniency for the source of classified information in a recent story by The Intercept about Russian cyber operations related to last year’s election.
The Ranking Member of the Senate Intelligence Committee told USA Today on Tuesday: “Whoever’s the leaker should be pursued to the full extent of the law.”
Warner did, however, ascribe some value to the information revealed by The Intercept and its source. He said that he was calling on intel agencies to declassify more details about the alleged Russian cyber attack.
“The extent of the attacks is much broader than has been reported so far,” the Senator added. Warner is co-leading an intel committee probe into Russian cyber activities centering around the election of Donald Trump.
On Monday, just hours after the publication of The Intercept story, a 25-year-old NSA contractor named Reality Winner was charged by the Justice Department with leaking state secrets to the publication.
The DOJ announced that Winner was arrested shortly after The Intercept’s story went to press.
The article was based on a secret intelligence report that alleged Russian cyber operation against US election infrastructure software in the weeks leading up to last November’s contest.
It charges that Russian military intelligence conducted a spear-phishing campaign directed at US election officials and companies administering voter software and hardware. The Intercept was careful to note that the leaked document “does not show the underlying ‘raw’ intelligence on which the analysis is based.”
According to the government’s affidavit, Winner had access to the secret reporting through her job as a contractor with Pluribus International Corporation, working out of an NSA facility in Georgia.
She is alleged to have printed out the record from her workplace before mailing it to The Intercept.
The affidavit also alleges that her capture was facilitated by an unnamed reporter with The Intercept who disclosed information about the document and where it was mailed from to a separate government contractor in order to determine its authenticity. The government claims that the information provided by the reporter helped narrow the pool of suspects down to Winner.
In a statement released on Tuesday, The Intercept cast doubt on the DOJ’s assertions, while maintaining that it still does not know the identity of its source.
“Winner faces allegations that have not been proven,” the outlet stated. “The same is true of the FBI’s claims about how it came to arrest Winner.”
