Former NSA staffer Reality Winner’s mother has turned to Donald Trump asking to pardon her daughter after his comments today denouncing the sentence as "so unfair" and a "double standard," thereby referring to Hillary Clinton getting away with repeatedly spreading classified information. The tweet naturally sparked a wealth of memes, centered around Hillary’s debacle as well as the much debated email leakage controversy and her opposition to Trump:
Billie J. Winner-Davis has been regularly updating her “Justice4Reality” account on Twitter as part of an ongoing campaign to free her 26-year-old daughter.
“You have the power to undo this and pardon my daughter Reality Winner!! Please I am asking you for justice,” she most recently tweeted, inviting loads of polarized comments.
Many Twitter users have brought in another whistleblower, notorious WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, while calling Trump to heed Winner-Davis’s request.
“If Trump was a man who makes deals, he should take this one and also pardon @JulianAssange Otherwise it is going to continue to get more and more publicly humiliating for him and his family and entire cabinet in congress,” one user stated, with another one chiming in:
“I hope that Donald Trump Pardons her and @JulianAssange.”
However, the opposite point of view can also be observed in the comments.
“I think the point that needs to be made here is your daughter was wrong and should be in jail. Along with Hillary and anyone else passing secrets,” one user soberly stated, with many sharing the same stance.
Another user opted to draw a line between “pardoning” and “doing justice:”
Some couldn’t resist speculations on convicted NSA staffer’s name.
Many users picked up on the caomparison with Clinton, implied in Trump’s tweet:
In a much-publicized case, Reality Winner was sentenced to over five years in prison on Thursday after she issued a guilty plea in June over espionage charges. Winner was indicted over leaking a classified document detailing alleged Russia collusion during the 2016 presidential campaign to The Intercept in 2017.
The document, which was found to have been handed out to The Intercept by Reality herself due to microscopic NSA markings on it, contained an NSA analysis of an alleged Russian hacking attempt on US voting infrastructure days before the presidential election. The document, however, did not allege the hack altered any votes.