US Arrests Contractor Accused of Leaking Classified Document to News Site

The U.S. Justice Department announced Monday the arrest of a government contractor it said sent classified material to an online news outlet.

The announcement came the same day as a report by The Intercept, saying a classified document it obtained showed Russian military intelligence tried to hack into U.S. voter registration systems before last year's elections.

An affidavit submitted by an FBI special agent said the woman arrested, Reality Leigh Winner, admitted to printing classified intelligence reporting and mailing it to a news outlet.

The affidavit also says a U.S. intelligence community agency determined in its investigation that six people had printed the document, including Winner, and that she had email contact with the unnamed news outlet.

The dates in both the document mentioned in the affidavit and the one cited by The Intercept are the same.

The government did not say from which agency Winner allegedly took the top secret document, saying only that she was assigned to work at a U.S. government facility in the state of Georgia.

In its report, The Intercept said the top secret National Security Agency document it obtained said the Russian hackers spent months trying to gain access to computers used by local election officials.

The effort involved so-called phishing techniques that are used to trick people into unwittingly hand over login information to hackers that can then be used to access data.

The first target was companies that provide local governments with software to manage voter registrations, with subsequent attacks targeting the local election officials themselves in the days before the November 8 vote.

It is unclear how successful the hackers were.The Intercept says the NSA analysis "does not draw conclusions about whether the interference had any effect on the election's outcome."

The U.S. intelligence community issued a report in January saying it assessed that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign targeted at the U.S. election in order to both undermine faith in the process and harm former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's chance of winning against now-President Donald Trump.

That report said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's assessment was that the types of systems the Russians "targeted or compromised" were not involved in counting votes.

Two U.S. Congress committees and a special counsel named by the Justice Department are investigating Russia's efforts targeting the U.S. election, as well as whether anyone in Trump's campaign colluded with the Russians.

Putin has denied the Russian government meddled in the election, but said that Russian "patriots" with no ties to the government may have been involved in hacking.