President Obama on Wednesday said his decision to commute the sentence of WikiLeaks leaker Chelsea Manning after sanctioning Russia for allegedly leaking information to the same government transparency group did not constitute hypocrisy, as some have charged.
“I don’t see a contradiction,” the outgoing president said at his final press conference.
“First off, I haven’t commented on WikiLeaks generally,” he continued. “The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russia hacking were not conclusive as to whether Wikileaks was winning or not in being the conduit of information through which we heard about the Democratic National Committee emails that were leaked.”
Manning was originally sentenced to 35 years in prison after leaking Army documents to WikiLeaks. The former intelligence analyst served seven years and is now expected to be released in May. Those who testified against Manning at trial said he may have put U.S. assets at risk by leaking such sensitive information.
Obama recently imposed new sanctions on Moscow, including expelling 35 Russian diplomats from the U.S., after U.S. intelligence officials determined that Russian civil and military actors were behind election-related hacks that embarrassed Democratic politicians and operatives working on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Some members of the media suggested on Tuesday that Obama had behaved hypocritically by commuting Manning’s sentence after being so critical of Wikileaks during and immediately after the 2016 election.
