Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning on Sunday claimed the Trump administration is intent on prosecuting reporters who print leaked information, especially reports that contain national security intelligence.
She also said she doesn’t plan to share any new information about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with a grand jury this week, which will run her the risk of additional jail time.
“This administration clearly wants to go after journalists. I think that if the administration gets its way as it’s laid out, you know, in repeated statements — the media’s the enemy of the people kind of thing, you know — then I think that we’re going to see that national security journalists and … for this administration press, we’re probably going to see indictments and charges,” Manning told CNN host Brian Stelter.
“Whenever a journalist makes a misstep, I think that they are put on notice now that the FBI and the Department of Justice are going to go after them on the administration’s behalf,” said Manning, who added that the Eastern District of Virginia has become a “rubber stamp” for these types of prosecutions.
Manning was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 for violating the Espionage Act and other offenses when she leaked 750,000 classified and sensitive military and diplomatic documents to Assange. Former President Barack Obama commuted her sentence days before leaving office in January 2017.
Manning was jailed earlier this year for two months after refusing to testify before a grand jury about her contacts with Assange nearly a decade ago.
Assange was sentenced May 1 to 50 weeks in jail for violating his bail conditions during his claiming asylum at Ecuador’s embassy in London in 2012. At the time, Swedish authorities had attempted to extradite him on sexual assault charges.
She said Sunday she had not known at the time that she was talking with Assange himself. She criticized the prosecution’s calling another grand jury, which she was subpoenaed to testify at this Thursday.
“There is an enormous amount of computer forensics in this case. They don’t need me to do a case on how it happened. They have that. What they are really interested is what my intentions were, what my impressions of what that would look like would be, and how much of that would be published,” she told Stelter.
Though her unwillingness to share new information may send her back to jail, she was optimistic her legal team had a valid case for her defense.
“I think we have a much stronger case in terms of like the legal objections, which the previous judge refused to even hear. He refused to even hear them or act on the motions. He just simply placed me in contempt and ignored our motions,” she said.
