This article first appeared in Counterpunch on June 16, 2023.
Is Reality a Winner?
by John Kendall Hawkins
Reality, the new film about whistleblower Reality Winner, who secreted a single NSA classified document to The Intercept, while working for military contractor Pluribus in 2016, is a peculiar depiction of her arrest by the FBI and her confession to them without a lawyer present. The film emphasizes that its dialogue is based entirely on a transcript of the FBI interrogation at Winner's home on June 3, 2017. There are some cutscenes to her Pluribus office cubicle, where Fox News is on "all the time" (FBI Director Comey has been fired by Trump), and where we will watch her stuff the folded classified article down her panty hose to sneak it out. The document purportedly provides "proof" that the Russians interfered with the 2016 US presidential election. There's some dramatic visualization, but it's almost entirely a re-enactment of the recorded conversation between Winner and the feds.
Reality stars Sydney Sweeney, who has played to critical success in The Handmaid's Tale (2018), Euphoria (2019), and The White Lotus (2021). Agent Garrick and Agent Taylor, the FBI agents, are played by Josh Hamilton and Marcha'nt Davis. Winner has a cat and a foster dog, who hates men (the previous owner beat her). She lives in a seemingly quiet residential neighborhood of Augusta, Georgia, although we discover that she was recently accosted by a stranger as she returned home. She has three weapons in her house for protection -- a pink AR-15, a 9 Glock, and a 15 gauge. (Agent Taylor, a black man, quips in response to her cache of weapons, "You sound like my house.") Once the dog is put in a cage out back, the search warrant is executed (a small army of feds show up for the search) and the interview/interrogation of Reality Winner takes place.
What's happened is that The Intercepthas published a highly valued whistleblower document that derives from the NSA and purports to detail how the Russians set up an operation to meddle in the 2016 presidential election by contacting voting officials and gaining access to voting machinery, with a view to changing voting results. The top secret report, dated May 5, 2017 "is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light," claims the Intercept.
Reality Winner was outraged when she saw this NSA document online at her Pluribus office and, as she describes in the film, she couldn't fathom how this information of such public importance had not made it to the MSM. The suggestion being that Winner feels that the NSA document is suggesting that the Russians helped put Donald Trump in the White House. This is what president Obama had been implying in the days leading up to Trump's January 2017 inauguration, while he told viewers that the US could "do stuff" to Putin.
At the time of the piece, The Intercept featured the prize-winning journalists who'd found the alternate-to-the-MSM news site, Glenn Greenwald (No Place to Hide), Jeremy Scahill (Blackwater), Laura Poitras (Citizenfour), as well as defector star reporters from the MSM, such as James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (the NYT had quashed, as a favor to NSA head Michal Hayden, their bombshell StellarWind story in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election; StellarWind would not be reported in detail for another nine years when Ed Snowden revealed everything), and even the editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, had come from now-respectable lefty stock, The Nation (they were somewhat edgier in the days of Alexander Cockburn's Beat the Devil columns).
The FBI interrogation of Reality takes place at the back of the house in a spare, clean well-lighted room. They are all standing, until towards the end, when Reality breaks down. As a script of how the feds play it, it is excellent; in this case, their good cop / good cop approach is designed to allow the officers to probe her emotions around the periphery, looking for fissures they can exploit, without ever putting her on the defensive. Reality gets comfortable and settles into denying that she's done anything wrong.
Although the actors did a reasonably good job with the re-enactment, there are few creative flourishes. Probably they even listened to the tape, so basically did a mimic job here. Sydney Sweeney was svelte and suave and an attractive proxy for Reality, but no Oscars are coming her way for this; it wasn't what you'd call a euphoric experience, angst-ridden neither. I was trying to remember what the 80-odd minute scene reminded me of. All I could think of was Clint Eastwood's 2019 depiction of the FBI interview of Richard Jewell, the security guard at Centennial Park during the July 1996 Olympics in Atlanta who was falsely accused of setting off a bomb that killed people. That interview was at Jewell's home and followed a similar pattern of semi-scripted questions designed to make Jewell rat himself out. But this ain't that.
Since we know the outcome of the interview (arrest and conviction), one wonders what import the film was trying to deliver. I found it worth watching, if for no other reason than I didn't carefully follow the Reality Winner whistleblowing saga. Maybe her name put me off, laughing; I can be shallow, too. This was a chance to understand the facts of the case. Strange film. Nothing really happens for the first 25 minutes or so. We know that when the FBI arrives, it ain't no fishing expedition: They got a warrant (car, cellphone, house) and probable cause and have already narrowed her down as the prime suspect of the crime that they want her to tell them more about, without them telling her what the allegation is right away. She fully cooperates with The Man; no lawyer is summoned; they don't suggest that she call one. The dialogue begins to tighten:
Special Agent Garrick: Okay. Uhm-and I mean, you've kind of already answered this-have you ever taken anything out of, uh, the NSA facility? I mean, you mentioned the PKI, but -
RW: Yes.
SAG: -outside of that, have you ever taken anything out of the facility?
RW: No.
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