President Barack Obama is commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning, an army intelligence analyst who shared classified documents with Wikileaks, on his way out out of the White House.
Manning, who went by the name Bradley at the time of the crime, was sentenced to 35 years in prison in August of 2013.
Obama ordered her release day to be moved up on Tuesday to May 17, 2017, cutting her jail time down to more than six years.
Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who fled the country after he stole a tranche of classified documents and exposed government secrets, neither applied for a pardon, the White House said, nor did he proactively receive one.
He thanked Obama in a tweet on Tuesday afternoon for sparing Manning from a life in prison.
Scroll down for video
President Barack Obama is commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the army soldier who shared classified documents with Wikileaks, on his way out out of the White House
Manning, who went by the name Bradley at the time, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for her crimes. She'll get out in May
'In five more months, you will be free. Thank you for what you did for everyone, Chelsea. Stay strong a while longer!' he said in another tweet alongside a 2010 photo of Manning dressed as a woman.
Manning had applied for leniency through the Department of Justice. A favorable outcome seemed probable, given Manning's multiple suicide attempts and recent White House comments.
The president plans to give another round of criminals early release before his final day in office this Friday, the White House says.
They were cast as low-level drug offenders whose sentences would have been shorter if they were sent to jail now. He commuted 209 sentences today.
Asked about Snowden at his last press briefing on Tuesday, before the commutation notice went out, Obama's spokesman said, 'I cant rule anything in or out.' He noted then that Snowden had not filed paperwork to seek clemency from the administration.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had challenged Obama to grant Manning clemency in exchange for extradition to the United States.
The anti-secrecy group called Manning's forthcoming release a 'victory' in a statement Tuesday afternoon that didn't mention Assange's promise.
'Thank you to everyone who campaigned for Chelsea Manning's clemency. Your courage & determination made the impossible possible,' Assange said via the organization's Twitter.
A previous Wikileaks tweet had said, 'If Obama grants Manning clemency Assange will agree to US extradition despite clear unconstitutionality of DoJ case.'
A White House official could not say on a Tuesday evening call detailing the Obama commutations what case or charges Wikileaks was referring to in the tweet.
The senior official said the president's decision 'was not influenced in any way' by Assange, who lives in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, or Wikileaks.
Manning's sentence is being commuted to time served 'to ensure that the sentence that she served is comparable to the sentences that were handed down to individuals who committed comparable crimes,' the White House official said.
Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who fled the country after he stole a tranche of classified documents and exposed government secrets, did not apply for a pardon, the White House said, nor did he proactively receive one
He thanked Obama in a tweet on Tuesday afternoon for sparing Manning from a life in prison
The White House laid the groundwork for her to get a commutation last week, differentiating the case from that of Snowden, who had lobbied the White House to commute Manning's sentence, as well.
Unlike Snowden, Manning, arrested in 2010, 'acknowledged wrongdoing,' the White House said, and appeared in a military court. She was convicted in 2013 of illegally sharing 700,000 State Department and military documents.
Snowden has taken refuge in Vladimir Putin's Russia, 'a country that most recently made a concerted effort to undermine confidence in our democracy,' Obama's spokesman said, and refuses to return to the U.S. face prosecution in the United States.
The Manning and Snowden cases have similarities, Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said, but they are quite different in scale and scope. Snowden's theft was ten-fold, a reported 1.7 million secret documents.
'Obviously, as Chelsea Manning has acknowledged, and as we have said many times, that the release of the information that she provided to WikiLeaks was damaging to national security,' Earnest said. 'But the disclosures by Edward Snowden were far more serious and far more dangerous.'
Republican Senator and Afghanistan veteran Tom Cotton said he was baffled by Obama's decision in a quick reaction to Manning's planned release.
'When I was leading soldiers in Afghanistan, Private Manning was undermining us by leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks,' Cotton said.
'I don't understand why the president would feel special compassion for someone who endangered the lives of our troops, diplomats, intelligence officers, and allies. We ought not treat a traitor like a martyr.'
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had challenged Obama to grant Manning clemency in exchange for extradition to the United States. It's unclear what charges are being brought against him and in what case
The White House said on its call with reporters that 'the president continues to believe that her actions were criminal, and were not good for the country. They harmed our national security.'
But he believes that her six years in prison are' sufficient,' for several reasons, including the remorse she has shown for her actions.
Manning's military record states she was suffering from gender identity disorder when she stole and released classified documents, and a court ordered the army in September to pay for her gender reassignment surgery.
The transgender soldier's attorneys have said that she was placed in solitary confinement as punishment for a July suicide attempt and other abuses in prison contributed to her mental state and a second attempt on her life this fall.
Steve Scalise, House Republicans' top vote counter said in a statement after the White House call that the Manning commutation 'is an insult to the rule of law and is an added stain on his legacy of abused executive action.'
Obama also granted 64 pardons today - including one to retired Marine Gen. James 'Hoss' Cartwright, the former head of his joint chiefs of staff.
He plead guilty in October to a felony charge for providing a false statement to the authorities.
The anti-secrecy group called Manning's forthcoming release a 'victory' in a statement Tuesday afternoon that didn't mention Assange's promise
The 67-year-old was accused of sharing classified information to New York Times reporter David Sanger and lying to the government about it.
The four-star general insisted he was not the source of the leak to Sanger about a secret cyber attack on Iran meant to undermine its uranium enrichment system. But he told FBI agents that he didn't confirm the information, either, and has admitted his statement to the feds was untrue.
Explaining the president's decision to pardon Cartwright, due to to be sentenced today, a White House official said the retired general's service to the country weighed heavily in the decision, as did his motive.
Cartwright said he was trying to prevent the publication of the information. The White House also noted that Cartwright was not the source of the information, although he did confirm it.
Obama is giving a slew of convicts fresh starts on his way out, including Oscar Lopez-Rivera, a Puerto Rican nationalist who has served 35 years in prison already for 'seditious conspiracy' and would have died behind bars were it not for Obama's intervention.
Lopez-Rivera was offered a conditional commutation by Bill Clinton in 1999 but rejected it. The Obama White House claimed today that he stayed in prison because a co-conspirator was not being released.
His fellow FALN member has since left prison, clearing the way for Lopez-Rivera's commutation, a White House official said.
A New York Times article previously stated that Lopez-Rivera turned Clinton down because he would not, as commanded, disavow the use of terrorism tactics to achieve his Marxist-Leninist group's aims.
The White House laid the groundwork for her to get a commutation last week, differentiating the case from that of Snowden, who had lobbied the White House to commute Manning's sentence, as well
In commuting 209 sentences, in addition to the 64 pardons, today Obama broke a White House record, granting more second chances than any other president in history.
Obama has handed out a sum total of 1,385 commutations during his time in office - more than the last 12 presidents combined, the White House said Tuesday, and he plans to hand out more on Friday, leaving the door open for a Snowden pardon, though it remains highly unlikely.
The outgoing president told German publication Der Spiegel last month that he 'can't' pardon Snowden, who's wanted for three felony charges tied to his 2013 exposure of the NSA's bulk data program, because he hasn't presented his case in court.
'I think that Mr. Snowden raised some legitimate concerns,' Obama stated. 'How he did it was something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community.
Obama, a Harvard-educated constitutional lawyer, said, 'If everybody took the approach that I make my own decisions about these issues, then it would be very hard to have an organized government or any kind of national security system.'
0 Response to "Barack Obama commutes Chelsea Manning's sentence"
Post a Comment