Announcer (00:00:01):
Due to the themes of this podcast, listener discretion is advised.

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Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies.

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Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This podcast is produced and hosted by Chris Carr.

Chris Carr (00:00:37):
On today’s podcast, I’m joined by Reality Winner. In May 2017, whilst working for a U.S. defense contractor, Reality Winner leaked a classified NSA report to The Intercept. It revealed how Russian military intelligence had attempted to breach America’s voting infrastructure in the days before the 2016 election. Reality discusses with me, in her own words, her thoughts and feelings around leaking classified information, then being arrested, convicted, serving jail time, and now how she’s attempted to rebuild her life. Some listeners may not agree with what she did and what she has to say, but personally, I think this is a very interesting interview, and I felt I got a real sense of who she is and where she was coming from. So I hope you enjoy this episode.

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Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Take care.

Announcer (00:01:25):
The opinions expressed by guests on Secrets and Spies do not necessarily represent those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast.

Chris (00:01:48):
Reality, welcome to Secrets and Spies. Great to meet you.

Reality Winner (00:01:52):
Thank you so much for having me.

Chris (00:01:54):
Yeah, it’s great to have you on. So for the benefit of listeners who may know your name from the headlines, how would you describe who you are today beyond the infamous NSA leaker?

Reality (00:02:04):
Honestly, I’m just the typical American. I have a criminal record, so I know what millions — I think it’s 9 million — other Americans are going through as far as trying to find jobs in this fractious economy we have right now. But I don’t identify as that. I’m just “Coach Re,” and I’m known as the person who will pick up any animal I find and try to rescue it.

Chris (00:02:28):
Oh, brilliant, brilliant. Well, thank you again for joining me today. Obviously, we’re going to chat a bit about your experiences, and I hope this conversation doesn’t cause you any distress, because that’s not my intention. I just want to get your story, as much as we can, out there. Before everything that happened in 2017, you had built a serious career in intelligence. You were fluent in multiple languages, serving as a linguist in the Air Force. Can you take us back to that journey — what drew you into the military and then later the NSA?

Reality (00:03:01):
Yeah, there are many of us millennials in our thirties who were greatly impacted by 9/11. Hindsight is 20/20 — there was a lot of propaganda around the event — but for us, that was the first time we saw a very dangerous world. From that day forth, I started looking at the world as something to be fixed. My father was a psychologist and a theologian, and he had always wanted to decode where faith and faith-based ideologies could lead to such violence. Obviously, there’s a massive geopolitical impact to that beyond using faith to brainwash people. From 2001 until I turned 18 in 2010, my idea of the future was based on learning everything I could about terrorism, including the languages of countries overseas where it was being hosted, and really going into counterterrorism and protecting the United States.

Chris (00:04:22):
Is there anything you can tell us about your service at all, or is that as much as you can tell us?

Reality (00:04:29):
I joined the Air Force explicitly to become a linguist. I knew that the Defense Language Institute existed because my older brother had gone through it previously. I actually wanted to go into the Army, and then my parents had a big intervention and threatened to make me talk to him about going into the Air Force.

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That alone was enough for me to go into the Air Force recruiter’s office, and my initial language choice was Arabic and then Pashto, but they assigned me Farsi. It took a few years of schooling and angling to get into a Pashto class as well. From then on, my missions were primarily focused on the war in Afghanistan, which is exactly what I had wanted to do. Unfortunately, I realized that as a linguist in the Air Force, my chances of deploying to Afghanistan to see for myself the war and the people involved — because I was very much interested in the humanitarian aspect of the war at that time — were slim. I thought, as a woman, as a white woman, how can I get closer to this conflict so I can see what the world needs? I went with the Air Force, and they said, “You’re not going to deploy.” So I got out of the Air Force and started seeking private defense contracts. I picked up the one I was at at the time of the felony as a Farsi linguist, but I was still in contact with recruiters trying to get a deployment to Bagram.

Chris (00:06:10):
Yeah. And why don’t they allow linguists in the field? Is it because, if you got captured, you’d be able to give away something, or...

Reality (00:06:21):
No, absolutely not. We were of zero value in that regard. It was more about the education they’d put into us. It cost $2 million for a security clearance, and, with satellites, we could do our job from a desk, which was a lot cheaper than having us forward-deploy.

Chris (00:06:38):
Yeah. I recently watched the film about your experiences of being arrested, and I remember you — or at least the actress playing you — mentioned you potentially wanted to deploy with special forces. Is that right?

Reality (00:06:54):
Yeah. In language school they corrected me that what I wanted to become was a debriefer — someone who talks to non-enemy combatants to get the full story of what’s going on after an operation. I just wanted to talk to people. I wanted to understand where people were coming from and how the United States kicking down doors in Afghanistan was only perpetuating the ideology we were allegedly against in Afghanistan.

Chris (00:07:33):
What were your ambitions then before the leak? Where did you imagine your career in the NSA would take you?

Reality (00:07:41):
I was really ambitious and really naive. I wanted to get another 10 years under my belt and be that counterterrorism expert. I wanted to be in the Oval Office. I wanted to be the person telling the President of the United States: so much of this extremism can be solved through early childhood development. It could be solved through infrastructure in these countries and not having an entire generation grow up with PTSD. That was my goal: to position myself into that. Without an Ivy League education, I thought I would build it one contract at a time, one deployment at a time, and have a résumé that nobody could argue with.

Chris (00:08:25):
Yeah. And did that feel realistic to you prior to the leak, or did you feel you needed an Ivy League education to get to that point?

Reality (00:08:33):
Honestly, it did feel realistic. Where I was at, watching the wars I was watching — could I have used my GI Bill? Yes. Could I have gotten into an Ivy League school? Maybe, probably. But I was so obsessed with Afghanistan and Syria that I didn’t want to go be a child again — four years in school. I wasn’t going to connect to anybody else in my age range because I was so obsessed.

Chris (00:09:02):
Yeah. How did working inside the world of intelligence shape your understanding of America’s role in the world?

Reality (00:09:08):
Where I was, it was so low level and so compartmentalized. I was still with people who saw a mission that was good, with clear objectives. When I worked Afghanistan, we were protecting American soldiers. We were not part of what people would call the deep state. What we were given in front of us was one clear objective, one clear task — and that’s what we did. There could be larger reflections on how insidiously you can have a million people convinced that their one piece of the machine is good while the machine is doing bad things in the bigger picture.

Chris (00:09:56):
And do you feel, then, that the machine is doing bad things in the bigger picture?

Reality (00:10:05):
Yeah, I think we severely fucked up with Afghanistan. Reading the Afghanistan Papers — and even by 2012, when I was still in Persian-Farsi Intelligence School — reading Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban, I understood that we’d been at war with those people for 11 years by that point, and there were no clear-cut objectives as to what we were doing fighting them. We didn’t actually know who they were; they weren’t uniformed. And they had very little to do with 9/11 itself. The leader of the Taliban didn’t even know that the Twin Towers existed until he saw them falling down on September 12th. They had to bring a TV to him. That was the big enemy I was suddenly wearing a uniform to fight a war against. The disillusionment against that — and, obviously, post-2021, seeing how we left the country and where the country is now — and then reading Donald Rumsfeld’s memos that we were not there for nation building... Then what did we do? Why did we prop up that government and then abandon it? It’s so hard to understand how I was sold an idea of what we would be doing over there, and then, honestly, the one thing we needed to do was just send food and medical supplies.

Chris (00:11:38):
Yeah. What did you feel — what do you feel — you were sold that you were going to be doing in Afghanistan? Did you feel it was about nation building and making a better place, or was it something else?

Reality (00:11:50):
Nation building, making it a better place, talking people off that ledge of that ideology. From studying the Taliban, I saw they weren’t necessarily at war with the United States. They would say ugly things, but their primary goal was within the four corners of Afghanistan. If we had left well enough alone and used economic carrots to walk them back from Sharia law, it would’ve happened. It would have taken very long, but at least walking them back from international terrorism would have been more possible than blowing up half the country.

Chris (00:12:34):
Yeah. Okay, thank you very much for that. I’m going to move us into the document you shared with The Intercept. The document you shared — an NSA analysis on Russian cyber operations during the 2016 election — has now become part of the public record. What did you see in that report that made it feel significant enough to share?

Reality (00:12:58):
I can’t really talk about the contents, but I knew that we were living in Trump’s America and the document was identified as belonging to the NSA and that it was Top Secret. I knew we were past the phase of critical thinking and that, with America’s media literacy, people needed to see the brand and the source. That was my goal in sending the entire document to The Intercept and not just whispering it to a journalist the way Congress does their little leaks. I wanted the American people to see the text — black letters on white paper — and I wanted them to see all of the facts so they could see what their media outlet was leaving out on purpose.

Chris (00:13:51):
Yeah. And were you surprised that the document hadn’t leaked before you shared it with The Intercept?

Reality (00:13:57):
Yes. We were waiting one day at a time for that to hit the news.

Chris (00:14:00):
So you thought somebody would put a whisper in Congress’s ear, so to speak?

Reality (00:14:04):
Honestly, that document was so clear-cut that some experts have postulated to me it was bait — that it was too good to be true, that it was something they knew would leak and they were waiting for someone to leak.

Chris (00:14:21):
And then, on the day you printed the report, James Comey had just been fired as FBI Director. In that moment, did it feel like a spontaneous act, or did you sense you were crossing a line you couldn’t come back from?

Reality (00:14:36):
It’s so hard to go back to that time — not necessarily because of the trauma of the arrest, but because I did print the document and I did mail it out, and for two, three weeks, nothing happened. Every day moving forward from that, I waited seven days. On the eighth day, I woke up and it wasn’t a headline. I said, the only way I can move forward and continue coming into NSA as an employee is if I forget this happened. So I forced myself to forget all those ideas — everything I did on that day — in order to survive moving forward, because I was convinced it either never got delivered, it got lost in the mail, or they saw it and didn’t take it seriously — that it really didn’t happen. That was so strong. I wasn’t sleeping. My eyes were twitching. I was shaking all the time. To get past that, I pretended it didn’t happen.

Chris (00:15:46):
With what you were feeling, did you ever think about using an internal whistleblower channel, or did they feel closed off from the start — especially with this subject matter and at that time?

Reality (00:15:58):
They felt closed off from the start. I had repeatedly asked HR at NSA to not stream Fox News on every available television within the building; I had asked for less partisan media. Seeing that in 2017, I thought every relevant agency had seen it. I thought Congress had seen it. I thought everybody was in on it, and they were just laughing at the American people.

Chris (00:16:32):
Yeah. And do you think they were literally trying to brush it under the rug — largely because it was embarrassing to Trump or something?

Reality (00:16:42):
I thought they were trying to go along with the new king. If I had known most of the government hadn’t seen it — even though a million of us with clearances had seen it — I would have taken it to Bernie Sanders myself. I would have gotten in a car and driven it to Bernie Sanders, and at least I would’ve done my four years in prison as the girl who committed espionage with Congress, right.

Chris (00:17:05):
Yeah.

Reality (00:17:06):
That would’ve been much easier. But when you think the entire government’s in on it, you do something stupid.

Chris (00:17:13):
Yeah, indeed. Many of our listeners — as we recently found out — are former intelligence officials, and they may well be critical of your decision to leak information. What would you say to them and others in government service about that decision and why you made it?

Reality (00:17:29):
I was critical of leakers too. Because of Snowden, we had to go through extra turnstiles and have our lunchboxes looked through. Nobody wants to be the person at the office who makes everybody else’s job inconvenient. The Jack Teixeira leaks on Discord were widespread and damaging to Ukraine, right?

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You can’t be “all leaks good” or “all leaks bad.” I think incredible discretion can be used, and I would ask them to see that at the time of the leak I 100% believed that document was obsolete, and I 100% believed that document was kept from relevant government agencies — even though it was obsolete — because they wanted to appease the current administration. I would have them look more critically at how we prosecute leaks and that the government has zero burden of proof in court to show damage to national security. You could leak anything — you could leak an email; you could leak your high-side password — and get hit with the same Espionage Act. When you’re sitting in the courtroom and the government doesn’t have to prove you caused damage to national security, we have an unjust law.

Chris (00:18:55):
We talked a moment ago about some internal whistleblower channels. What could be improved to prevent people from leaking when they feel compelled to?

Reality (00:19:07):
I’m a spokesperson for Whistleblower Aid (whistlebloweraid.org). That’s so hard to say right now.

Chris (00:19:14):
That’s right.

Reality (00:19:16):
They are not asking for your information. They don’t want to know your leak. If you’re thinking about leaking, you can send them an encrypted message, and they will team you up with a pro bono lawyer who will advise you on how to leak in a protected way. Again, they will never ask you for the information you have, how you have it, or what agency you’re from. You will be assigned a lawyer who will walk you through how to protect yourself, and all of that is free. Moving forward, that needs to be done — especially for fraud, waste, and abuse-type situations. If you have a general leak, you’ll also have a lawyer telling you: you will not be protected by law; the American people will not have your back; you will be charged in this district. If I had known I would be charged in the Southern District of Georgia — or charged at all like that — no way. They’ll tell you: this is the judge you’re going to get; this is who they’re trying to please; and you will get a play-by-play of what your future will look like or how to do it safely. I’m not saying don’t do it, but there is an infrastructure out there that will help you for free.

Chris (00:20:50):
Yeah. Is there anything government agencies could do better to help, if there’s a situation where somebody’s in your shoes and you could speak to somebody confidentially within the organization? It sounds a bit ridiculous, but is there something government agencies could do to be more transparent in their actions?

Reality (00:21:13):
Absolutely not. These agencies are rotten to the core, and they have us do these annual PowerPoints about the insider threat. It covers somebody selling nuclear secrets to North Korea, and somebody like me — I made that PowerPoint — I’m now in that briefing as someone who did it ideologically. There is no internal infrastructure. If you feel like the government is hiding something from the American people — imagine you find out who actually shot JFK — and then you’re going to go to your HR office and be like, “Hey, I think the American people should know this.” You are going to be in a cell in the basement before you know it. There is no way to reason with these agencies. You either feel so strongly that you get out, or you work with a lawyer to get the information out.

Chris (00:22:08):
Looking back at your experiences, do you wish the public conversation had focused more on what the document revealed rather than who revealed it — being you?

Reality (00:22:17):
Yes, absolutely. I believe that was on purpose by The Intercept. They had zero intention of publishing that information. They worked with the feds to find out who I was, and they did not publish the document until the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia wanted to have a press conference revealing my identity that Tuesday of my arraignment. They published it, I think, maybe 43 minutes before that press conference because they knew my name would hit the headlines and people would be Googling it and looking for the document, and they would miraculously have it up — because they believed they had a martyr on their hands. From day one of this whole ordeal, this has only been about who I am. It has never been about the document, and that was completely on The Intercept. That’s their fault. If they didn’t want to publish that information, they should have burned the document and moved on. Instead, they chose — Matthew Cole of The Intercept chose — to make this about who I was.

Chris (00:23:30):
Why do you think that was?

Reality (00:23:35):
Because he’s messy. Because he’s scandalous. He’s a small man. I mean, I have nothing nice to say about him. This was all because of him. I did what I did. I take responsibility for what I did. I was willing to go down for that document, but I wanted that document to be published to the American people. I wanted people to see the importance of that information and then have the authorities looking for me.

Chris (00:23:59):
Yeah. Yeah. Because The Intercept’s an interesting case study — they are the outlet who obviously collaborated with Snowden via Glenn Greenwald. But I’ve noticed Glenn Greenwald, in particular, went very Trumpy himself, and I wondered whether, internally, the ideology of the paper itself had shifted by the time you leaked that information.

Reality (00:24:21):
Honestly, because so many of the stories they were covering — like Yemen and Syria — they were acting like actual military correspondents, and they were very critical of both Obama and the incoming Trump administration. It just felt like people who were cynical about the deep state itself and not necessarily pro-Trump or pro-Democrat. I think Glenn just thinks of himself as a libertarian, which is Republican-lite. But like I said, he wasn’t even there at the time. He never wanted to publish that document. And for whatever reason, that’s fine. He doesn’t think I’m very intelligent. That’s fine. He is not the one who sent it to the NSA. He is not the one who tried to find out who I was.

Chris (00:25:15):
No, fair enough. Fair enough. The Intercept’s handling of your document exposed you. So what lessons should journalists and editors take from that failure?

Reality (00:25:23):
Find out who the rats are in your institution and get ‘em out. Eventually, Laura Poitras did resign from The Intercept over the handling of my document. She felt something wrong had been done. The Intercept refuses to publicly acknowledge it. They refuse to say who it was and why it happened. We have the correspondence, and we have the court evidence of how I was caught. Unfortunately, I’m not the only source they had caught. It is by design. They screwed over Terry Albury and Daniel Hale as well, because they like to do that — so they have somebody to prop up against the system.

Chris (00:26:09):
And how do you see the relationship between whistleblowers and the press today? Has that trust eroded since your case?

Reality (00:26:15):
I think it has. One of the messages of my memoir right now is to show that if you really believe in what you’re getting out into the public, you’ve got to be ready for four or five years in prison. I went through it. Terry Albury went through it. Daniel Hale went through it. Obviously, we are required to say we would never recommit that crime again, and I honestly don’t think I would — given that it was made about me and not what I thought the American people needed to know. I should have worked with my congressmen — or picked a congressman to work with on that. I should have had more faith in my elected representatives. But at the same time, if you’re going to do something, find a journalist you trust, find a lawyer you trust, and also look at my memoir: I survived. I made it through. And you can too.

Chris (00:27:17):
You watched immediacy turn you into a symbol or a caricature. What did that teach you about how information and identity are weaponized in American politics?

Reality (00:27:26):
I learned that anything you say or do on social media will be pulled out of context. For example, I was doing a yoga competition with my friend to hold the longest plank possible, and I laughingly said at minute 22, “Oh, I hate everything.” And that’s what the media decided to pull — even though that was in 2015, a year before all of this happened. They decided to show that as the reason I did what I did. They didn’t want people on the right to be sympathetic to me, so there were no pictures of me with my AR-15. They were very selective in how they portrayed me in the media. And, obviously, what the prosecution said about me was probably more traumatic than anything. The fact that none of the journalists in the room were willing to pick up on the fact that the prosecutor could say things like, “She was clearly sympathetic to the Taliban.”

Chris (00:28:39):
Yeah. What was that about?

Reality (00:28:41):
My defense team was not allowed to get up and say, “Your Honor, she is not, and we can prove it,” because your character and intent are not relevant when you are charged with espionage. Even though the prosecution could say it and not be checked by the judge, we were not allowed to rebut it. And that was the half of the story journalists were not catching. Nobody wanted to write in The New York Times, “Oh, by the way, the judge silenced the defense attorney every time he stood up to speak, or threatened him with contempt because he pointed out the defendant’s demographics and why she would not make a good candidate for international terrorism,” and so on. They had found my journals and my notes about feeding children in Afghanistan, about neurology. They found my copy of Taliban by Ahmed Rashid — marked up with notes — and that I was studying ways to actually fix this generation of Afghans so that their best government option wasn’t the Taliban and they all didn’t have PTSD. And then they took one line.

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When I was very young, the Satanic Verses controversy happened a year before I was born, and my father was obsessed with it. He wanted to understand how one book could get a death sentence. He had one of the original copies of the book. He would show it to me and tap it, saying, “People are dying because of this book.” Until I could read actual chapters, I always read the very first page of the book — just the two main characters falling out of the sky. I read that over and over as a child, until I could understand the book. In a way, idolizing Salman Rushdie, I wanted a fatwa. I wanted to write a response based on mid-2010s knowledge of the geopolitical state of terrorism in the world with the rise of ISIS — probably write a sequel to The Satanic Verses. I had the thesis of the book written in a diary somewhere, and that’s what they quoted to make it seem like I was in support of terrorism, when I really just wanted to impress my favorite author. We weren’t allowed to make that argument in court, of course.

Chris (00:31:32):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for sharing that. It’s very interesting. Do you still plan to write that book one day?

Reality (00:31:39):
Since I pretty much did get a fatwa from one sentence, I might let that book stay unwritten.

Chris (00:31:47):
Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough, fair enough. Just back to the leak and the press for a moment: if you could do the leak again, would you still choose to send it to the press, or would you do it differently?

Reality (00:32:02):
After everything I’ve gone through — and mostly because I hurt my family so badly — I have to say I would never commit that crime again. It was a mistake; I did not handle the information properly, and I did betray an agreement I had signed with the United States of America. However, if I were still going to prison — if I were going down for this — like I said, I would’ve hand-delivered it to Bernie Sanders.

Chris (00:32:28):
Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

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Let’s take a break and be right back with more.

(00:32:32):
You write that the Espionage Act isn’t really about espionage; it’s about control. So what makes that law so dangerous in your view?

Reality (00:32:56):
Study the history. When it was first drafted, it wasn’t at the start of World War I. It was — well, “drafted” is a funny word to say — but it was signed into law after the first draft for World War I, and it was not just about protecting locations of troops and ships and stuff like that. It was about making sure people could not impede the first registration of men for the draft, and that’s how it was used primarily. Throughout the next hundred years or so, it’s been used primarily against people who bring information forward to the press, and less for actual people who commit espionage.

Chris (00:33:48):
We’ve kind of touched upon this already, but do you think your prosecution has changed anything inside the intelligence community, or do those cultural blind spots still exist?

Reality (00:33:57):
I think they still exist. I know there are quite a few people now giggling because I’m on the brief as an insider threat. I can’t even imagine what it felt like actually making it through the Trump presidency the first time around as a federal employee or a subcontractor. I only made it three months before I kind of snapped. I couldn’t take it anymore. I can’t imagine anybody still doing it now — anybody not getting paid to do it now. I mean, how much do you hate yourself?

Chris (00:34:38):
Yeah. Do you have any friends who’ve been subjected to those DOGE cuts or anything like that?

Reality (00:34:46):
Anyone who would have been hasn’t been allowed to talk to me since 2017.

Chris (00:34:53):
Okay. Okay. Fair enough. How do you think the U.S. should balance secrecy with the public’s right to know?

Reality (00:34:59):
I don’t like cops, but there are times when there is a police investigation and something is pending, and that information should not be public. But once there’s a conviction — once we know, say, a serial killer is caught and put away and there’s no appeal — everything about that case should be transparent. And that’s how I feel about much larger things. If a war is resolved, we should know everything about World War II. We should know where all those Nazis went — into our space program. We should know where they went. We should know about Operation Paperclip. Same thing with Vietnam. Same thing with the MLK murder. We should know everything. Once it’s resolved, we should have all of that information. Same thing with 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report barely scratches the surface, and the fact that any of that would be held... The idea is: if you don’t have secrets, people can’t be suspicious of you. As long as there’s not something pending that is sensitive, I think the average person — even your most cynical listener — could appreciate that it should immediately be published for public consumption. That way you don’t have all these conspiracy theories.

Chris (00:36:45):
Yeah, yeah. Do you think there is a habit to over-classify things then, and just hold onto things for the sake of it?

Reality (00:36:52):
Oh, absolutely. I can’t remember who published a book on it, but they basically said that in the evolution of the actual classification act — when we invented classification levels — I think we produce 2 billion classified documents a year now. It’s crazy. You have to have classification officers, you have to have spaces for it, you have to have data servers for it. All of that has to be super-encrypted. If you want to complain about AI wasting water, talk about these terabytes of classified, irrelevant information that our government has to store for however many years an unelected bureaucrat decided it needs to be stored.

Chris (00:37:39):
Some people obviously compare you with other whistleblowers and leakers like Edward Snowden. How do you feel about those comparisons?

Reality (00:37:47):
I like Ed a lot. I think we have a lot in common. He was obviously more into the tech side of it — trying to get information out digitally. We know why he’s stuck in Russia. We know how that happened. I don’t necessarily mind it. I prefer to stand in the company of people like Daniel Hale and Terry Albury, because we did what we did and then we faced the consequences and got through it. I think surviving the public humiliation of being tried and convicted in this country is not something anybody wants to do, but millions of Americans go through it anyway. The fact that we did it and we made it through — I wish their names were a lot more publicly highlighted because what they did was really important.

Chris (00:38:52):
And obviously you’ve spoken with figures like Daniel Ellsberg and Thomas Drake. What did those conversations teach you about the cost of conscience?

Reality (00:39:00):
I always tear up, because the very last time I spoke to Daniel Ellsberg before he passed — it was really close before that — there was this progression. At first, he said I wasn’t a whistleblower; I was just a leaker. And then, over the years, he kind of came around, and the last thing he ever said to me was that he was proud of me and that, if he could do anything over again, he wouldn’t have waited. He said, “You saw something, and within a week you did something,” and that’s what he wished he had done. I put this in my memoir. That’s how I know we don’t really talk about Harry Potter anymore because J.K. Rowling is a [bleep], but I grew up feeling like Harry Potter — waiting for someone to come around and tell me I was special. That was Dan Ellsberg. Coming from him — saying he wished he had done what I had done — when he’s Daniel Ellsberg... No one can ever take that moment away from me.

Chris (00:40:22):
Thank you for sharing that. You said that you believed Americans are being lied to. When you look at the U.S. today — with disinformation and distrust rampant — do you feel anything’s changed?

Reality (00:40:34):
Oh, we are absolutely being lied to — and we’ve always been lied to. We can go back a hundred years of white voters losing their money and their food and their public spaces because they’ve been sold the lie of racism: that they can’t possibly share with anybody who doesn’t look like them, or — God forbid — they share it with Black Americans. We’re seeing that right now. People will not get their SNAP benefits in November, and they’re being sold this lie that they’re going to defend a pedophile and then lose the food they want on the table for Thanksgiving. And the idea that welfare is for lazy people — when more white people are on welfare than anybody else — we are being lied to. Not even in a super-sexy counterterrorism, top-secret, espionage, deep-state type of way. Americans are being lied to fundamentally about who is worth more as a human being — who deserves food, shelter, clean water, clean air, and healthcare — and who doesn’t. Part of that lie stems from what people think they’ve earned or deserved — the lie of privilege. These lies go so deep into our identity, and they’re entrenched within our religious institutions as well — Christian nationalism.

(00:42:15):
The biggest lesson for me from this experience is to stop looking outside our borders for some foreign threat. Our homegrown ideology of white supremacy is what’s going to cause this country to collapse. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing right now.

Chris (00:42:34):
There’s a whole Alt-Right information ecosystem on YouTube, etc., and some podcasts in our space sometimes fall into that category. I feel there’s a lot about the deep state and conspiracy theories thrown around that distracts from more grounded issues like social welfare and things like that. Because I’m in the UK, we’re very lucky at this time to have a National Health Service and certain social benefits should things go wrong — though, unfortunately, that’s slowly changing. I don’t know where the question’s going now, but do you feel things like the deep state and conspiracy theories are a distraction from more tangible issues?

Reality (00:43:29):
I definitely think they are. The concept that the government was created to undermine what certain people think they deserve is a huge part of it. However, I don’t think tech has necessarily made it worse. They didn’t need YouTube to convince millions of white Americans that they could own people from Africa. They didn’t need technology for that. This is unique to the original sin of the United States, and the digital environment now is just another place for it to take hold.

Chris (00:44:16):
I find it’s a bit more covert too. There are a lot of podcasts that are very Alt-Right but very light, and people watching them don’t realize the ideology underneath. I’ll point at Joe Rogan. He has a lot of people on his show who are very questionable, in my opinion. A lot of people consume that content but don’t realize they’re ending up in an Alt-Right mindset. I’ve had many friends who’ve gone down that rabbit hole and, unfortunately, not come out of it in a good way. What do you feel about those kinds of things?

Reality (00:44:53):
Honestly, I used to enjoy Joe Rogan — probably until about 2023. Obviously, he would have very far-right-leaning people on, and I’d just be like, “No.” But he had a four-hour podcast with the author of Cobalt Red at a time when it wasn’t getting a lot of mainstream attention. He’s also had prison abolitionists on his show before, and he’s been very progressive. He used to have no-name comedians and seven to ten hours of UFC content per week, and I liked that sport.

(00:45:40):
It used to be that. Over the years I really wished he didn’t have these crazy far-right people on there. I wish he didn’t make Tulsi Gabbard sound so sane. For me, one of the biggest breaks was the “litter boxes in schools” thing — he didn’t really push back on that. I stopped listening shortly after that. You can have those people, but you also need somebody the next week to say, “Actually, those things are false, and this is why.” He used to be a little more progressive. He used to talk about the war on drugs — where it started in the United States and what it was for. I’m disappointed in him following the money and the sponsorships and the circle jerk — that alt-right, conspiracy-theory circle generating so much revenue online because the clicks go around and the eyeballs are on it. I wish he would stand up more for the things he used to believe in. Every now and then you see clips where he’s pushing back — he’s starting to turn against ICE. He’s starting to be like, “Actually, this is not what I envisioned when I had RFK on seven times last year and made everybody listen to that voice for three hours at a time.” I think there would be so much more revenue and, frankly, saving his soul if he came back to why he started his show all those years ago. Unfortunately, there’s too much positive feedback in these right-wing pockets of the internet. I’ve lost a lot of respect for him because of the people he’s now catering to. They’re domestic terrorists. They’re Nazis — literal Nazis. People say, “Don’t be so hyperbolic,” but I’m sorry — they have actual swastikas and double lightning bolts.

Chris (00:47:59):
Yeah, you can’t get more Nazi than that.

Reality (00:48:01):
I don’t know what you want me to call them. It’s so disappointing. He could change all of that by selecting different guests for his show. He could change it by growing a backbone again.

Chris (00:48:22):
Yeah.

(00:48:22):
Let’s take a break and be right back with more.

(00:48:24):
You describe the prison system as a system where cruelty is the point. So what did those years teach you about the America that you didn’t know before?

Reality (00:48:51):
It’s crazy, but two weeks before that, I had watched 13th on Netflix and had been kind of cued into Jim Crow 2.0 and understanding that we don’t have to have enslaved people in fields to profit off the ownership of human bodies. And the industrialization of our prison system is exactly that. If I had been allowed one more year of research, I would’ve found out about Harry Anslinger and the start of the war on drugs, and how the substances that we define as illegal are tied to an ethnic identity in this country to fill jail cells around the country. They don’t even have to get a federal — well, they’re going to get a federal — conviction, but the federal prison system isn’t where so much of the money is. It’s all in those pretrial county jails getting federal contracts. And the prison population has increased exponentially in the last 25–30 years alone.

(00:49:59):
And the revenue — you would think, “Oh my gosh, we have so many people incarcerated; it’s $32,000 per year of taxpayer money to house these individuals.” But that money is then just being paid to the feds. So the feds are paying the feds to prosecute human beings. It is the biggest money-laundering scheme — probably not as big as the Pentagon, but it’s close. Some of the people I was incarcerated with should never see the light of day again. It’s very hard being a prison abolitionist when I have personally had to share a cell with a child molester. It is very hard to argue for that knowing the worst of the worst. But at the same time, I don’t know how to reform a system that was an extension of slavery. I don’t know how to do that. It’s kind of like the death penalty — the number of Black men in the United States who have been wrongfully executed — and the fact that we have no chance of reversing the racial profiling of who is deemed competent to stand trial, or who is deemed an adult in this country who can stand trial as an adult, or who gets the juvenile system.

(00:51:28):
It’s like, if you’re not going to do it right, don’t do it at all — and we’ll just have street justice. I don’t know what else to say at that point.

Chris (00:51:37):
And about your experiences in prison, how did you preserve your sense of self through confinement and then, obviously, public vilification?

Reality (00:51:49):
It was... and there’s a reason why, to this day, I don’t watch anything about me. I don’t read anything about me. I’m not going to go listen to this interview to see how you edited it or whatever. Anytime I see something about me, I physically start shaking very badly and my teeth start chattering, because I would get out of court, I would be shackled for a 40-minute drive, come back to my jail cell, want to wash myself off, and then the local news would come on — and it was a ritual. People were institutionalized. They had to watch the local news, and that was when the TV anchors would repeat verbatim every unfounded accusation the prosecution made about me. And I had to live in a room with people who were media-illiterate who would hear that and be like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t know you were Russian; you were in the Russian military; you’re a spy; you tried to kill Donald Trump.” And I’m just like, no — that’s not what they’re saying.

(00:52:57):
It was bad enough hearing it from the prosecution, but then the terrible game of telephone that is the American media — and then the media illiteracy of the people of the United States — was so physically traumatic. The only thing that kept me going was knowing that my mother, and people around her, were creating a following on Twitter and were creating a social movement to support me. And the fact that I got 20 letters a day; I had any book I wanted. People started seeing that — people started... I mean, the people who would just send the most beautiful greeting cards — which sounds so dumb — but when you’re in a place where you’re not even allowed toilet paper, and I’m getting these origami cards, I’m getting these shiny cards with glitter and stuff like that, and people are like, “Oh, people care about you.” And then I was getting resources. People were pressuring the jail to give us fresh food. So I earned — “earned,” I’ll say — fresh fruit for the entire jail of 75 people. And that was the first fresh fruit some of those people had in years.

Chris (00:54:17):
That’s insane — and well done for doing that.

Reality (00:54:20):
And so people started to understand that I wasn’t just trying to get ahead for me; I wanted better for everybody around me. And that’s really how I positioned my time as an incarcerated person.

Chris (00:54:39):
And you mentioned you found purpose teaching fitness and yoga inside. Why did physical strength become a key part of the emotional survival for you?

Reality (00:54:48):
Because, well, before I was ever locked up, I had several eating disorders and, at one point, had starved myself down to 11% body fat, which is critically low for a female to be at. My recovery from that was going into CrossFit. CrossFit doesn’t care what your body weight is. CrossFit doesn’t care about your body dysmorphia; it’s just: what can you do that day? It was so competitive and intense. And so when I was locked up, the hardest thing for me was: “Oh, I can’t do CrossFit.” The one thing that kept me from being bulimic was the very first thing that I had lost. So I shaped every single day around, “How do I do CrossFit in a six-by-six cell? How do I make that happen?” I mean, that was why I was not involved in my own defense. That is why I refused meetings with my attorneys — because it interfered with the time I would spend desperately trying to work out.

(00:56:06):
And then in prison, my one goal was to take over the recreation department — and not just, like, “Oh, I was getting paid 12 cents an hour to teach a fitness circuit class or a spin class” — but because people would see me and know I had access to that space whenever I wanted it. All I had to say was, “I’m going to work,” and the compound officer would let me go to that recreation department. I was the first one there. I had access to the equipment — not because I’m, like, main-character energy. It was because if I do not work out enough today, I am not eating today — therefore I’m not surviving today. And that’s the only thing I focused on for four years.

Chris (00:56:55):
Thank you for sharing that. After your release, what has rebuilding a life and an identity looked like for you?

Reality (00:57:02):
CrossFit.

Chris (00:57:03):
Yeah, fair enough.

Reality (00:57:04):
I’m in a — stop — I’m in a cult. Y’all can call me stupid. It has been... I mean, the moment I got out of the halfway house and got to come home on an ankle monitor, it was: if I can’t go past my house for 200 feet, how do I run?

(00:57:25):
So I started running circles around the yard. My parents bought me an indoor bike — a stationary bike — so I started doing my own spin classes. Someone bought a rig and a squat rack for me and a barbell. So I built a gym at my house, and my mom got me a job as a CrossFit coach because I had to have a job once I got out of the halfway house — you’re just required. And I applied everywhere in town. I mean, I still say it today: I could apply at Walmart and not get a callback. I cannot work in this country. And so she put on Facebook, “Hi, my daughter’s a yoga/CrossFit coach — yoga, fitness, blah, blah, blah,” and my third-grade music teacher saw that on Facebook, and she was like, “Hey, my daughter owns a gym and they need a coach.”

(00:58:20):
So the moment I had that ankle monitor cut off, I met with my probation officer. I still wasn’t even authorized to drive, and my dad took me to the gym and I met my boss. And from that day forth, I have been in that gym six days a week, and it’s been four years now. I’m the head coach, and that’s been my entire identity. I got into dog rescue and, since then, have used my GI Bill to get into a veterinary technology program at my local university. And so if I’m not in school and I’m not home with my dogs, I’m at that gym with my clients. And that’s what my entire life — my entire hustle — is about right now.

Chris (00:59:04):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, good for you for being able to get into that — brilliant. And you mentioned a bit about the animal care. Do you want to talk a bit more about that, because that’s very important to you?

Reality (00:59:16):
Yeah, actually, I’m surprised I haven’t started crying. Yesterday — my boyfriend’s terrible — he just sends me pictures of bloodied-up cats.

(00:59:28):
And then, the message — he waits like five minutes and then sends the actual message — and it was: he said a buzzard was eating this kitten alive on the side of the highway. And I was just like, “That’s great. I can’t really afford this right now, but let me take it to school.” The director of my program gave him some medical care. We are fostering him for right now because I cannot afford another cat in my life. We already have three rescues, but that’s what we do: we find animals on the side of the road and get them to medical care as soon as possible, and we figure out the rest later. One of my other foster dogs — the family just committed to her — so she’s staying in her forever home. We have two foster dogs right now. Now I’m getting a third one back tonight. So we usually stay around eight to ten dogs.

(01:00:23):
It’s not always happy. I’ve found dogs hit by cars before, so, out of my own pocket, I’m the one that takes them in. But we make the final call when we can’t save them, and I’m the one holding the dog when it passes. That’s what rescue is. My goal in life is to make sure that every animal finds the best possible resolution for its life. We have 10 acres — hopefully someday, with some grants, or maybe after we survive this fascist takeover of America, I would like to have a dog sanctuary for dogs that aren’t suitable for homes. In my life, I bought a dog. I thought she would be perfect because I bought her and because she had been vetted, and she turned out extremely aggressive. And so we’ve built our life around accommodating her. And I know not every family’s going to have those types of resources and that type of dedication to work with a dog like that. And so that’s part of what I want my rescue efforts to go towards — and then also just working in the medical field and working in animal control. That’s what I really hope this degree is going to put me in a position to make my life’s work.

Chris (01:01:45):
Yeah. I hope that works out for you. That sounds very good. Just wrapping up, then: you’ve written about forgiveness toward the government, the media, and yourself. How do you practice that now?

Reality (01:01:57):
I feel like I have adequately remedied my reputation. You can look anywhere and find me telling you what I did and why I did it. I feel like I have addressed every degrading lie that the prosecution has levied against me. Forgiveness and revenge are so close together — I can do both just by living a better life. And I don’t need a lot of validation. I don’t really like it when people tell me I’m a hero. I don’t feel like a hero. I don’t even really feel like a whistleblower. I just feel like a scandalous leaker. But I know that there’s not going to be a movie about that prosecutor showing that she saved your country. I know that. I know that, in the end — whether you think I’m an idiot or not — the public record that I’ve left behind is not somebody who has damaged national security for the United States. I am not somebody who betrayed my country. I can’t speak to why it happened, but there are institutions and agencies that have said that I left them in a better place because of my leak. There’s an entire documentary about it. And so I know that I’ve made it through this, and I don’t need to hold anything against anybody because I’m living better despite what I’ve been through.

Chris (01:03:39):
And then, if a young analyst felt the same moral tension you once did, what would you tell them before they act?

Reality (01:03:47):
WhistleblowerAid.org? Do not go to The Intercept, honestly. Don’t go to any corporate-owned media — really research all of these places. And, honestly, really think about it. Is this information going to change something right now? Or can I go and do something in my local government that’s going to improve somebody’s quality of life? I definitely think that we are where we are — I fell victim to it — but we are where we are because we let the President of the United States make decisions. We gave that office the power to impact our day-to-day life. And that is not how the United States was structured to be. It was that your local government — your city, your county, and your state government — should be the first and only thing that impacts your life. And most people can’t even name their own mayor. Most people don’t know what laws are up for a vote in their county or state in a few weeks when November starts. But they know what the President’s doing.

(01:05:00):
And I do feel like the media, the Republican Party, and corporate Democrats have been pushing for this for 50 years now — since Reagan — to consolidate power to where we are all waiting for one person in that Oval Office to determine if we get welfare or healthcare, when it should have been... Why can’t we have a push against federalism — maybe the Anti-Federalists were onto something? Definitely a push for more individual states to take charge of the quality of life within that state’s border and say, “We don’t need a president. We don’t need a federal government,” and have more states in this country decide not to send their taxes to a federal government that’s going to send them to other states or put them into a gilded ballroom. We need to start: state first — Texas first, California first. These states need to start acting on their own and show the government that that’s how this country was designed.

Chris (01:06:07):
Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish today? Something I might have missed that’s important to you?

Reality (01:06:12):
No. I mean, people just need to continue to think critically. I mean, this is obviously going to be very niche. Your audience are already individuals who are paying attention to the rest of the world and know the cycles of dictatorship and know what we’re falling into.

Chris (01:06:31):
Well, Reality, we want to thank you so much for your time today. Where can listeners find out more about you and your book?

Reality (01:06:38):
So I am on Instagram as reazlepuff — R-E-A-Z-L-E-P-U-F-F. But mostly those are just going to be dog videos and stuff like that.

Chris (01:06:47):
That’s cool.

Reality (01:06:49):
But there is a link to my book there. My book is published through Spiegel & Grau. If you want to buy directly from the publisher — or wait a while and get it used on ThriftBooks — that’s fine as well. Get it bootlegged; please don’t get it from Amazon. And you don’t need to know anything else about me unless you’re interested in what my dogs are doing. There’s going to be a massive boycott and a general strike, November 25th through December 2nd. Don’t do a single thing on Black Friday. Go into a Victorian-era depression and lay in bed the entire day and feed somebody else on Thanksgiving. That’s the most important thing I can tell any American listening to this right now, because we’ve got to find a way to shut this down and to stop it.

Chris (01:07:41):
Well, thank you again for your time on the show today. It’s been really great to meet you and chat with you. Thank you.

Reality (01:07:47):
Thank you so much. This has been really nice.

Announcer (01:08:20):
Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.