President Obama commuted the sentences of 209 individuals Tuesday, including an Army private who is serving a 35-year stretch for leaking thousands of pages of classified intelligence to the hacking group WikiLeaks.
The president’s decision to commute Chelsea Manning’s (nee Bradley Manning) sentence seems an odd one, considering the White House’s post-election remarks characterizing WikiLeaks as an enemy of the United States.
A recent declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence claimed Russian operatives hacked into the private email accounts of Democratic National Committee staffers and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
The report said those emails were then fed to WikiLeaks, which published them in installments during the 2016 election.
The hacks, and the subsequent publishing of the stolen communications, were part of a deliberate effort to swing the election in President-elect Trump’s favor, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.
Since Nov. 8, the White House and its Democratic allies have accused WikiLeaks and other foreign agents of seeking to undermine the “integrity of our election system and our democracy of America’s open and free elections.” The president and his team have also had sharp words for those who’ve questioned the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of Russia and WikiLeaks involvement in the 2016 election.
“[M]y hope is that the president-elect is going to similarly be concerned with making sure that we don’t have potential foreign influence in our election process,” Obama said during his year-end White House press conference. “I don’t think any American wants that. And that shouldn’t be a source of an argument.”
In January, the White House imposed another round of sanctions on Russia, explaining at the time that the new measures were an act of retaliation for the reported hackings. The administration also expelled several Russian diplomats from the United States.
In short, Obama and his team are taking the hacks very seriously, and they’ve no fondness for WikiLeaks for publishing the stolen communications.
Now back to Manning.
In 2010, the Army private was arrested and charged with leaking approximately 750,000 documents that included U.S. military intelligence from Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. The hacking group, of course, published all of it.
It was the largest leak of classified intelligence in U.S. history.
Though a U.S. counter-intelligence official said that a Pentagon-led review could find no example of a person dying as a result of the classified information being made available to al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden himself, Manning was nevertheless found guilty in 2013 of espionage, theft and fraud.
Manning was spared a life sentence, but was still ordered to serve 35 years in prison.
On Tuesday, Obama said Manning had done enough time.
Though commutations are not endorsements of the recipient’s actions, it’s hard to square Tuesday’s announcement with the White House’s position on WikiLeaks and the Russian hacks.
The president says the incoming administration must protect the U.S. from hostile foreign agents pushing harmful leaks. Then he goes and commutes the prison sentence of the person responsible for the largest leak of classified intelligence in the nation’s history? Not just any leak, mind you, but a leak to the same hacking group that the president and the U.S. intelligence community say are guilty of meddling in “our very democracy.”
How does one square opposition to WikiLeaks with clemency for the leaker who helped put them on the map?
Again, it’s all a bit confusing.
