Chelsea Manning

• 1. Introduction

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  Chelsea Manning is an American activist and whistleblower who, as a young Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, copied nearly 750,000 classified or sensitive military and diplomatic documents and passed them to WikiLeaks. To carry the files out of a secure workspace, she saved them on a rewritable disc and labeled it with the name of Lady Gaga. She also lip-synced to Lady Gaga songs, so that it looked as though the classified computer's disc drive was playing music. Nobody noticed. The person who finally exposed her was not a commander but an online acquaintance she had only just met. Who was this soldier, and why would someone holding a top-level security clearance hand over so much? What did the world do with the files once it had them? And what happened to a young person who, by many accounts, had been struggling in plain sight?

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• 2. A Childhood Between Two Countries

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  Manning was born in 1987 in Oklahoma City as Bradley Edward Manning, the second child of Susan Fox and Brian Manning. Susan was Welsh. Brian, an American, had joined the US Navy in 1974 at age 19 and served five years as an intelligence analyst. He met Susan while stationed at RAF Brawdy in Wales. The couple returned to the United States in 1979, lived first in California, and later bought a house with five acres near Crescent, Oklahoma, where they kept pigs and chickens.

  At the court-martial, Manning's older sister described a home shaped by drinking. She said both parents were alcoholics and that their mother drank continually during the pregnancy. A Navy psychiatrist, Captain David Moulton, told the court that Manning's facial features showed signs of fetal alcohol syndrome. The sister became the baby's principal caregiver, waking at night to prepare bottles. The court heard that Manning was fed only milk and baby food until the age of two.

  Brian worked as an information technology manager for The Hertz Corporation, and the job meant travel. The house stood several miles out of town, and Susan could not drive. She spent her days drinking while the child played with Lego bricks or sat at the computer. Before each trip Brian stocked the kitchen and left signed checks, which the sister mailed to pay the bills. A neighbor sent extra food or money along with her own son on school field trips, so that Manning would have something to eat.

  In a 2011 interview, Brian Manning offered a very different picture: "People need to understand that he's a young man that had a happy life growing up." He recalled a child who excelled at the saxophone, science and computers, and who built a website at the age of 10. Manning won the grand prize at the local science fair three years in a row and took top prize at a statewide quiz bowl in sixth grade. Even then she held opinions about religion and politics, and stayed silent during the line of the Pledge of Allegiance that mentions God.

  A childhood friend recalled a conversation at age 13 in which Manning said, "he told me he was gay." The friend also described a controlling father and an unhappy home. Manning's parents divorced, and Manning moved with Susan into a rented apartment in Crescent. In 1998 Susan attempted suicide. Manning's sister drove her to the hospital while 11-year-old Manning sat in the back seat, trying to make sure their mother was still breathing.

  Brian remarried in 2000, the same year as his divorce. His new wife, also named Susan, had a son who took the Manning surname. Manning felt pushed aside and told her mother, "I'm nobody now, Mom."

  In November 2001, at age 14, Manning left the United States with her mother for Haverfordwest, Wales, where Susan had family. A school friend at Tasker Milward secondary school described Manning to Ed Caesar of The Sunday Times as "unique, extremely unique. Very quirky, very opinionated, very political, very clever, very articulate." In 2003 Manning and a friend, James Kirkpatrick, set up angeldyne.com, an online message board offering games and music downloads. Socially, life was harder. As the only American at the school, and seen as effeminate, Manning was bullied, and classmates mocked her accent. She had told a few friends in Oklahoma that she was gay but kept quiet about it in Wales. Her aunt told The Washington Post that on one camping trip Manning woke to an empty campsite, because the other campers had left without her.

  Manning finished high school in 2005 at age 17 and returned to the United States, afraid her mother was too ill to cope. She moved in with her father, who was living in Oklahoma City with his second wife and her child. Manning found work as a developer at the software company Zoto and seemed happy there, but was let go after four months. Her boss told The Washington Post that she sometimes "just locked up" and sat staring, and that "nobody's been taking care of this kid for a really long time."

  By then Manning was living as an openly gay man. In March 2006, she reportedly threatened her stepmother with a knife during an argument about failing to find another job. The stepmother called the police, and Manning was asked to leave. She drove to Tulsa in a pickup truck her father had given her, sleeping in it at first before moving in with a school friend. In April the two of them took jobs at Incredible Pizza. Manning then moved on to Chicago, ran out of money, and again had nowhere to stay.

  Her mother arranged for Brian's sister Debra, a lawyer in Potomac, Maryland, to take Manning in. The biographer Denver Nicks wrote that the 15 months with this aunt were among the stablest of Manning's life. She had a boyfriend, worked several low-paid jobs, and studied history and English for a semester at Montgomery College, leaving after she failed an exam. The house in Potomac would turn up again in the investigation that followed years later.

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• 3. The Army Years

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  Brian Manning spent weeks in 2007 asking his child to consider joining the Army. In September that year Manning enlisted, hoping the G.I. Bill would pay for a college education and perhaps a PhD in physics. She later told her Army supervisor that she also hoped a masculine environment would resolve her gender dysphoria.

  Basic training began on the 2nd of October 2007 at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Manning wrote that she soon realized she was neither physically nor mentally prepared. Six weeks after enlisting, she was sent to the discharge unit. Another soldier told The Guardian that she was being bullied and was having a breakdown. Nicks writes that Manning was used to bullying and fought back. When drill sergeants screamed at her, she screamed at them, until they started calling her "General Manning". The decision to discharge her was revoked, and she began basic training again in January 2008.

  After graduating in April, Manning moved to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, to train as an intelligence analyst, listed in the Army as Military Occupational Specialty 35F. There she received a TS/SCI clearance, short for Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information. Nicks argues that this clearance, combined with the digitization of classified information and a government policy of sharing it widely, gave Manning access to an unprecedented amount of material. At Fort Huachuca she was also reprimanded for posting three video messages to friends on YouTube describing the inside of the secure facility where she worked.

  In August 2008 Manning was sent to Fort Drum in Jefferson County, New York. There she joined the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, and trained for deployment to Iraq. Her emotional problems continued, and by August 2009 she had been referred to an Army mental-health counselor. After four weeks at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, Louisiana, she arrived at Forward Operating Base Hammer, near Baghdad, in October 2009.

  From her workstation there she could reach SIPRNet, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, and JWICS, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. Two of her superiors had discussed leaving her behind, because it was felt she was a risk to herself and possibly to others, according to a later Army statement. The shortage of intelligence analysts decided the matter. In November 2009 she was promoted from Private First Class to Specialist.

  By all accounts she was unhappy and isolated. The military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy remained in effect until the 20th of September 2011, so she could not live openly as a gay man without risking discharge. Her night shifts ran 14 to 15 hours in a tightly packed, dimly lit room.

  On the 20th of December 2009, two colleagues counseled her about poor time-keeping and told her she would lose her one day off a week. She responded by overturning a table, damaging the computer on it. A sergeant moved her away from the weapons rack, and other soldiers pinned her arms behind her back and dragged her out of the room. Several witnesses believed her access to sensitive material should have been withdrawn at that point. In January 2010 she began posting on Facebook that she felt hopeless and alone.

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• 4. Moving the Files

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  Toward the end of November 2009, WikiLeaks posted 570,000 pager messages from the September 11 attacks, and Manning noticed. By January 2010 she was interacting with the group on two chat systems, IRC and Jabber.

  On the 5th of January 2010, Manning downloaded the 400,000 documents that became known as the Iraq War logs. On the 8th of January she downloaded 91,000 documents from the Afghanistan database, later known as part of the Afghan War logs. She copied the material onto her personal computer. The next day she wrote a message in a readme.txt file, which she told the court was initially intended for The Washington Post. A Readme text file that investigators later recovered called the Iraq and Afghan War logs "possibly one of the most significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare".

  Manning then copied the files from her laptop onto an SD card for her camera, so she could take them home with her on leave. On the 23rd of January she flew to the United States via Germany for two weeks. During that visit she went out dressed as a woman for the first time, wearing a wig and makeup. After her arrest, her friend Tyler Watkins told Wired that Manning had said during the visit she had found some sensitive information and was considering leaking it. In 2021, Manning said she had also reached out during the leave to her then-Congressman, Chris Van Hollen, and received no response.

  She tried the press as well. Manning contacted The Washington Post and The New York Times to ask whether they wanted the material. The Post reporter did not sound interested, and the Times did not return the call. She decided to give the files to WikiLeaks, and on the 3rd of February she sent the Iraq and Afghan War logs through Tor, a tool for anonymous internet use.

  She returned to Iraq on the 11th of February without any acknowledgment from WikiLeaks that the files had arrived. Around the 18th of February she passed along a diplomatic cable dated the 13th of January 2010 from the US Embassy in Reykjavik, Iceland. The site published it within hours, which suggested to her that the rest had arrived too.

  More followed. Around the 21st of February she sent the video of the Baghdad helicopter attack, which she had found in a Judge Advocate's directory. In late March she sent a video of the May 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan. Between the 28th of March and the 9th of April she downloaded the 250,000 diplomatic cables, and on the 10th of April she uploaded them to a WikiLeaks dropbox.

  Throughout this period, Manning said, she developed a friendship with someone at WikiLeaks, believed to be Julian Assange, although neither knew the other's name. Army investigators later found 14 to 15 pages of encrypted chats between Manning and someone believed to be Assange, preserved in unallocated space on her MacBook's hard drive. She wrote in a statement that the harder she tried to fit in at work, the more alienated she became. The relationship with WikiLeaks gave her a brief respite from the isolation and anxiety.

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• 5. Confession to a Stranger

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  The subject line read "My Problem". On the 24th of April 2010, Manning emailed her supervisor, Master Sergeant Paul Adkins, to say she was suffering from gender identity disorder. She attached a photograph of herself dressed as a woman, saved under the filename breanna.jpg. She wrote that she had thought a career in the military would get rid of it, but "it's not going away; it's haunting me more and more as I get older."

  Adkins discussed the situation with Manning's therapists but did not pass the email up his chain of command, because he worried the photograph would be circulated among other staff. Captain Steven Lim, her company commander, first saw the email after her arrest. He learned that she had been calling herself Breanna only when information about hormone replacement therapy was found in her room on base. Manning also told Adrian Lamo that she had set up Twitter and YouTube accounts as Breanna, to give her female identity a digital presence.

  The weeks that followed were chaotic. On the 30th of April, Manning posted on Facebook that she was utterly lost, and over the next few days wrote that she was "not a piece of equipment". On the 7th of May, according to Army witnesses, she was found curled in a fetal position in a storage cupboard, with a knife at her feet and the words "I want" cut into a vinyl chair. A few hours later she punched an intelligence analyst, Specialist Jihrleah Showman, in the face.

  The brigade psychiatrist recommended discharge, citing an "occupational problem and adjustment disorder". Manning's supervisor removed the bolt from her weapon so it could not fire, and she was sent to work in the supply office. Her security clearance remained in place. As punishment for the altercation, she was demoted from Specialist to Private First Class three days before her arrest.

  She was also looking for someone to tell. On the 9th of May, Manning messaged the gay American novelist Jonathan Odell in Minneapolis, saying she had been involved in some "very high-profile events, albeit as a nameless individual thus far". On the 19th of May she emailed Eric Schmiedl, a mathematician she had met in Boston, and said she was the source of the Baghdad airstrike video.

  On the 20th of May she wrote to Adrian Lamo, a former "grey hat" hacker who had been convicted in 2004 of accessing The New York Times's computer network without permission. Wired had profiled him that very day. Her encrypted emails were unreadable to him, but he replied anyway and invited her to chat on AOL IM. He later turned the emails over to the FBI without having read them.

  Between the 21st and the 25th of May, using the handle "bradass87", Manning told Lamo she was an Army intelligence analyst. Within 17 minutes, without waiting for a reply, she alluded to the leaks. Lamo wrote back hours later: "I'm a journalist and a minister. You can pick either, and treat this as a confession or an interview (never to be published) & enjoy a modicum of legal protection."

  Manning told Lamo she had started helping WikiLeaks around Thanksgiving 2009, after the pager messages appeared. She said she recognized them as coming from a National Security Agency database. She said Assange kept a deliberate policy of knowing little about her and had told her, "lie to me". The incident that affected her most, she said, involved 15 detainees arrested by the Iraqi Federal Police for printing anti-Iraqi literature. The Army asked her to find out who the "bad guys" were, and she found that the detainees had followed a corruption trail within the Iraqi cabinet. Her commanding officer "didn't want to hear any of it" and told her to help the police find more detainees. She told Lamo it made her realize she was "actively involved in something that i was completely against". She hoped the material would prompt "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms".

  Shortly after the first chat, Lamo spoke with Chet Uber of the volunteer cybercrime group Project Vigilant, and with Timothy Webster, a friend who had worked in Army counterintelligence. Both advised him to go to the authorities. Webster informed the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, and Lamo told agents he believed Manning was endangering lives. On the 25th of May he met FBI and Army investigators in California and showed them the chat logs. Two days later he gave Kevin Poulsen of Wired the logs and Manning's name, under embargo. The Army's Criminal Investigation Command arrested Manning on the 27th of May 2010.

  The hacker community largely ostracized Lamo afterward, although Nicks argues that it gave the government months to limit any harm from the diplomatic cables. Poulsen and Kim Zetter broke the news of the arrest in Wired on the 6th of June. The magazine published about 25 percent of the chat logs then and the full logs only in July 2011.

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• 6. What the World Read

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  WikiLeaks was set up in late 2006 as a disclosure portal where volunteers would write up restricted or legally threatened material sent in by whistleblowers. Its de facto editor-in-chief, the Australian internet activist and journalist Julian Assange, had the idea of building what Ben Laurie called an "open-source, democratic intelligence agency". The open-editing idea was soon dropped, but anonymous submissions stayed. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former spokesperson, said part of the security design was that the staff never knew who their sources were.

  On the 15th of March 2010, WikiLeaks posted a 32-page Defense Department report about WikiLeaks itself, written in 2008. On the 29th of March it posted State Department profiles of Icelandic politicians. Then came the video that made the site famous. WikiLeaks titled the Baghdad airstrike footage "Collateral Murder", and Assange released it on the 5th of April 2010 at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

  The video showed two US helicopters firing on a group of 10 men in the Amin District of Baghdad. Two Reuters employees were among those killed. They had been there to photograph an American Humvee under attack by the Mahdi Army, and the pilots mistook their cameras for weapons. The helicopters also fired on a van that had stopped to help the wounded. Two children in the van were wounded and their father was killed. The Washington Post wrote that the video, viewed by millions, put WikiLeaks "on the map". Nicks writes that after it aired, Manning emailed a superior officer and tried to convince her it was the same version stored on SIPRNet, as though she wanted to be caught.

  On the 25th of July 2010, WikiLeaks and three media partners, The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel, began publishing the 91,731 documents known as the Afghan War Logs. On the 22nd of October came 391,832 military reports covering January 2004 to December 2009, known as the Iraq War Logs. Nicks calls the first release a watershed, the "beginning of the information age exploding upon itself".

  The largest release was the "Cablegate" leak of 251,287 State Department cables, written by 271 American embassies and consulates in 180 countries between December 1966 and February 2010. Assange gave the cables to his three media partners, plus El Pais and others, and publication began in stages on the 28th of November 2010, with the names of sources removed. WikiLeaks said it was the largest set of confidential documents ever released into the public domain.

  On the 1st of September 2011, WikiLeaks published the remaining cables unredacted. David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian had inadvertently published the passphrase for a file that was still online. Nicks writes that an Ethiopian journalist consequently had to leave his country, and the US government said it had to relocate several sources. Manning was also accused of being the source of the Guantanamo Bay files, published in April 2011.

  One leak never reached the public. The Granai airstrike of the 4th of May 2009 killed between 86 and 147 Afghan civilians. Assange said in March 2013 that Domscheit-Berg had taken the video when he left WikiLeaks and had apparently destroyed it.

  Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said the release produced a story with the White House, the Kremlin, India and China all talking about it, and that he had never known a story that created "such mayhem that wasn't an event like a war or a terrorist attack". Admiral Michael Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the leaks put American soldiers and Afghan informants in danger. Glenn Greenwald argued that Manning was the most important whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. President Obama said Manning "broke the law", a remark later criticized as "unlawful command influence" ahead of her trial.

  In 2011 the leaked cables were credited in part with helping to spark the Arab Spring. In 2012 the historian James L. Gelvin pushed back, writing that journalists had abandoned the label "WikiLeaks Revolution" because it overemphasized the cables' role. A Washington Post editorial asked how an apparently unstable Army private had been able to reach and transfer so much sensitive material. A Defense Department report a year after the breach found no significant strategic impact on US war efforts. The heavily redacted final report was not published until June 2017, after a Freedom of Information request by the reporter Jason Leopold.

  Honors arrived for Manning while she was still in prison. In 2011 a German group of lawyers and scientists gave her a "Whistleblowerpreis", and Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash released a song about her, "Almost Gone (The Ballad of Bradley Manning)". In 2013 she received the US Peace Prize and the Sean MacBride Peace Prize, and Icelandic and Swedish Pirate Party MPs nominated her and Edward Snowden for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. In May 2015 the sculptor Davide Dormino placed bronze statues of Manning, Snowden and Assange at Berlin's Alexanderplatz for a weekend, in an installation called Anything to Say? In September 2017 she accepted the EFF Pioneer Award, and in October 2020 she shared a European prize for journalists and whistleblowers, accepting it by video from her home in Brooklyn, New York.

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• 7. Quantico to Court-Martial

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  Four days after the arrest, Manning was moved to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, where she was placed on suicide watch after her behavior caused concern. She was charged with several offenses in July 2010. In March 2011 these were replaced by 22 charges, including violations of Articles 92 and 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and of the Espionage Act. The most serious was "aiding the enemy", a capital offense, although prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty.

  On the 29th of July 2010, Manning was moved to the Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. She was classified as a maximum custody detainee with Prevention of Injury status, which meant guard checks every five minutes. Her lawyer, David Coombs, a former military attorney, said she was not allowed to sleep between 5 am and 8 pm on weekdays, and had to stand or sit up if she tried. Her cell measured 6 by 12 feet, with no window. She could walk for up to one hour a day, took meals in the cell, was shackled during visits, and could keep one magazine and one book.

  On the 18th of January 2011, after an altercation with guards, she was classified a suicide risk. Her clothing and eyeglasses were removed, and she had to stay in her cell 24 hours a day. The watch was lifted three days later after her lawyer complained, and the brig commander who ordered it was replaced. On the 2nd of March, Manning was told her request to end Prevention of Injury status had been denied. She joked to guards that if she wanted to harm herself, she could do it with her underwear or her flip-flops. That night she was ordered to strip and sleep without clothing, and the next morning she stood naked for inspection.

  The treatment prompted concern at home and abroad. Juan E. Mendez, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, called it "cruel, inhuman and degrading". State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley called it "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid". The next day, President Obama said the Pentagon had assured him the treatment was "appropriate and meets our basic standards". Crowley resigned three days after his comments. On the 15th of March, 295 members of the academic legal community signed a statement criticizing the conditions. On the 20th of April, the Pentagon transferred Manning to the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There she had an 80-square-foot cell with a window and a normal mattress, and could mix with other pretrial detainees.

  In April 2011, a panel of experts ruled that Manning was fit to stand trial. An Article 32 hearing, presided over by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Almanza, opened on the 16th of December 2011 at Fort Meade, Maryland. The prosecution, led by Captain Ashden Fein, presented 300,000 pages of evidence. Two investigators testified, Special Agent David Shaver and Mark Johnson, a forensics contractor from ManTech International.

  They said they had found 100,000 State Department cables on a workplace computer Manning had used between November 2009 and May 2010. The SD card in her room at her aunt's home held 400,000 military reports from Iraq and 91,000 from Afghanistan. Another 10,000 cables on her personal MacBook Pro had not been sent to WikiLeaks, they said, because a file was corrupted. Two chat handles using the Berlin Chaos Computer Club's domain were associated with the names Julian Assange and Nathaniel Frank. Johnson also found logs of a file transfer from an address at her aunt's home to a Swedish address linked to WikiLeaks. There had been two attempts to destroy the evidence. The operating system was reinstalled in January 2010, and around the 31st of January someone overwrote the hard drive with zeroes. The material was recovered anyway.

  Manning's lawyers argued that the government had overstated the harm and had overcharged her to force her to testify against Assange. They also raised questions about whether her confusion over her gender identity had affected her decisions. In January 2013, the judge, Army Colonel Denise Lind, ruled that any sentence would be reduced by 112 days because of the treatment at Quantico.

  On the 28th of February 2013, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 of the 22 charges. Reading from a 35-page statement for over an hour, she said she had leaked the cables "to show the true cost of war". The trial on the remaining charges began on the 3rd of June. On the 30th of July she was convicted on 17 of the 22 charges in their entirety, including five counts of espionage and theft, and on amended versions of four others. She was acquitted of aiding the enemy.

  At sentencing, a military psychologist, Captain Michael Worsley, testified that Manning had been left isolated in the Army, trying to deal with gender identity issues in a "hyper-masculine environment". Moulton said she had narcissistic traits and was "acting out a grandiose ideation". A defense psychiatrist said Manning believed that crowdsourced analysis of the documents would lead society to conclude that no war was worth it. On the 14th of August she apologized to the court: "I am sorry that my actions hurt people. I'm sorry that they hurt the United States."

  Her offenses carried a maximum of 90 years. The government asked for 60, and her lawyer asked for no more than 25. On the 21st of August she was sentenced to 35 years, a reduction in rank to private, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and a dishonorable discharge. She received credit for 1,293 days of pretrial confinement and would be eligible for parole after serving one-third of the sentence. The Guardian called the sentence "unjust and unfair", and The New York Times called it "excessive". Her request for clemency was denied on the 14th of April 2014.

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• 8. Transition and Freedom

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  The day after her sentencing, on the 22nd of August 2013, Manning's attorney sent a press release to the Today show. It read in part: "I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female." She asked to be called by her new name and by feminine pronouns, and said she wanted to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. News organizations split on whether to comply. GLAAD, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and the Human Rights Campaign urged outlets to use her chosen name.

  In April 2014, a Kansas court granted her petition for a legal name change. The Army said it would update personnel records but continue to regard her as male. Hormone therapy is provided in civilian federal prisons when medically necessary but not in military ones, and Pentagon policy at the time barred transgender people from serving. In July, the Federal Bureau of Prisons rejected an Army request to transfer her to a civilian facility. On the 22nd of August 2014, Army spokeswoman Lt. Col. Alayne Conway said the Department of Defense had approved medical treatment for an inmate diagnosed with gender dysphoria. In September, Manning sued Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, saying she had been denied medically necessary treatment.

  In February 2015, the commandant of the disciplinary barracks approved hormone treatment, a first for the Army. Manning was not allowed to grow her hair longer. Her ACLU attorney, Chase Strangio, said the delay had come at a significant cost to her mental health. On the 5th of March 2015, the Army Court of Criminal Appeals ordered that future filings refer to her with neutral terms or a feminine pronoun. By then the Army was providing weekly psychotherapy, hormone therapy, female undergarments, prescribed cosmetics and speech therapy. In a letter posted by Amnesty International, Manning wrote that it had been "such an amazing relief for my body and brain to finally come into alignment with each other." On the 13th of September 2016, the ACLU announced that the Army would grant her request for gender transition surgery, a first for a transgender inmate. The operation was not performed before her release. Manning later said her transition in prison had cost "only $600 over 2 years".

  In November 2016, she formally petitioned Obama to reduce her sentence to the six years she had already served. On the 10th of December, a White House petition for commutation reached the 100,000 signatures needed for an official response. Lawyers familiar with clemency applications said a pardon was unlikely. On the 17th of January 2017, Obama commuted all but four months of her remaining sentence. He said her 35-year term was "very disproportionate relative to what other leakers have received", and that commuting rather than pardoning made sense. President Donald Trump tweeted that she was an "ungrateful traitor" who should "never have been released". Manning left Fort Leavenworth at about 2 a.m. Central Time on the 17th of May 2017.

  Her appeal continued. On the 31st of May 2018, the Army Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction under the Espionage Act, ruling that she "had no First Amendment right to make the disclosures". On the 30th of May 2019, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces denied her petition for review. Meanwhile she made her living through speaking engagements, and in 2018 she challenged Senator Ben Cardin for the Democratic nomination in Maryland. She won 5.8 percent of the vote to his 80.4 percent.

  In February 2019, Manning was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in Virginia investigating Assange. She refused, saying: "I have nothing to contribute to this case and I resent being forced to endanger myself by participating in this predatory practice." On the 8th of March 2019, she was found in contempt and jailed in Alexandria, Virginia. She spent 28 days in administrative segregation, which her supporters called effective solitary confinement, before being placed in the general population on the 5th of April. She was released on the 9th of May when the first grand jury's term expired, and was immediately subpoenaed again. She refused again and was returned to jail. The court fined her $500 for each day over 30 and $1,000 for each day over 60.

  On the 11th of March 2020, two days before a hearing on ending the sanctions, Manning attempted suicide. She was recovering in a hospital when, on the 12th of March, Judge Anthony Trenga found that the grand jury's work had ended and ordered her released. He refused to cancel the $256,000 in accumulated fines. A supporter launched a crowdfunding campaign the same day, and within 48 hours nearly 7,000 donations totaled $267,000. A second campaign raised an additional $50,000 for her living expenses. In January 2021, UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser cited this suicide attempt as evidence when she refused to extradite Assange to the United States, finding that harsh American prison conditions would worsen his mental health.

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