#NSA whistleblower Reality Winner tests positive for coronavirus in prison

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Reality Winner exits the Augusta Courthouse June 8, 2017 in Augusta, Georgia.
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National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner has tested positive for coronavirus and fears she’ll die inside the Texas federal prison where she’s serving a five-year sentence, according to a report.

Winner, 28, who was convicted in 2018 of leaking a top-secret report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, told relatives that more than 500 inmates at FMC Carswell, a women’s prison in Fort Worth, have now tested positive for the global pandemic, The Guardian reported.

“Reality is concerned that she is going to die in there,” her sister, Brittany Winner, said in an interview, the outlet said. “Her concern before was that she would test positive, which she just did and 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.”

Two inmates have died from the deadly virus at the controversial federal lockup, which is the subject of complaints about unsanitary conditions.

“They are all sitting together in a concrete room facing the real possibility of dying hundreds of miles away from their family,” Dallas civil rights attorney Alison Grinter told the Guardian. “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.

Winner also told relatives that guards at the prison mock inmates who are infected with the virus.

“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. She 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.