Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was released from prison Thursday after being held behind bars since last May for refusing to testify before a grand jury about WikiLeaks.
Manning, who attempted suicide on Wednesday, according to the whistleblower’s legal team, was stuck with a $256,000 fine.
“Needless to say, we are relieved and ask that you respect her privacy while she gets on her feet,” Manning’s lawyers said.
Judge Anthony Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia released a three-page opinion on Thursday finding the business of the grand jury had concluded, dismissing the grand jury, canceling the Friday hearing, and ordering Manning released from prison. Trenga denied the motion from Manning’s lawyers to waive the more than quarter-million dollars in penalties that Manning had accrued at $100 per day for refusing to testify.
“It is hereby ordered that Chelsea Manning shall be, and she hereby is, immediately released from the custody of the Attorney General,” Trenga said. “It is further ordered that judgment be, and the same hereby is, entered against Chelsea Manning in the amount of $256,000.”
The judge said “enforcement of the accrued, conditional fines would not be punitive but rather necessary to the coercive purpose of the Court’s civil contempt order.”
Manning, 32, previously known as Bradley Manning, was convicted at a court martial trial in 2013 of leaking a trove of documents to WikiLeaks. Manning pleaded guilty to 10 of 22 charges, including five counts for espionage. Sentenced to 35 years in prison, the former intelligence analyst’s sentence was commuted by Barack Obama just days before the end of his presidency in January 2017.
Manning has been imprisoned and released twice now after declining to provide testimony in relation to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, whom the United States is seeking to extradite from the United Kingdom.
Manning was brought to a Virginia hospital on Wednesday after an apparent suicide attempt, and Alexandria sheriff Dana Lawhorne said it was “handled appropriately by our professional staff and Ms. Manning is safe.”
“She remains unwavering in her refusal to participate in a secret grand jury process that she sees as highly susceptible to abuse,” Manning’s lawyers said Wednesday. “Ms. Manning has previously indicated that she will not betray her principles, even at risk of grave harm to herself.”
Manning previously made two suicide attempts while in solitary confinement while held on the original charges, and appeared to be threatening to commit suicide on Twitter in May 2018.
Manning’s legal troubles stem from contact with WikiLeaks and Assange.
Assange, 47, was arrested at Ecuador’s Embassy in London early last year in connection to a single U.S. charge of conspiring to hack a classified Pentagon computer network in 2010 by agreeing to help Manning crack a password. Federal prosecutors later accused the WikiLeaks founder of violating the Espionage Act as part of a new superseding indictment last May, charging him on 17 new counts.
There are no publicly known charges against Assange for his role in exposing the CIA’s “Vault 7” program in 2017 or his connection to Russia’s election interference in 2016.
After a week of legal arguments in February, a three-week evidentiary hearing won’t begin until May. The Justice Department said the charges “relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.”
Describing Assange as “the public face of WikiLeaks,” the Justice Department said he founded the website with the purpose of it being “an intelligence agency of the people.”
The Justice Department said “Manning responded to Assange’s solicitations by using access granted to her as an intelligence analyst to search for United States classified documents, and provided to Assange and WikiLeaks databases containing approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,000 Iraq war-related significant activities reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. Department of State cables.”
The indictment also said the information that WikiLeaks published “included names of local Afghans and Iraqis who had provided information to U.S. and coalition forces,” which prosecutors alleged “created a grave and imminent risk that the innocent people he named would suffer serious physical harm and/or arbitrary detention.”
The Justice Department said the disclosures from WikiLeaks put sources working with the U.S. “at great risk to their own safety,” including “journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents who were living in repressive regimes and reported to the United States the abuses of their own government.”
“I object to this grand jury,” Manning wrote to Trenga last year, “as an effort to frighten journalists and publishers, who serve a crucial public good. I have had these values since I was a child, and I’ve had years of confinement to reflect on them. For much of that time, I depended for survival on my values, my decisions, and my conscience. I will not abandon them now.”
Manning was found in contempt of court on March 8, 2019, and had been in jail ever since.
