Chelsea Manning thanks Obama for commuting sentence

Jailed US Army private Chelsea Manning thanks President Barack Obama for commuting her 35-year sentence for handing classified US documents to WikiLeaks.

“Thank you @BarackObama for giving me a chance,” Manning says in a tweet published on her official Twitter account, two days after the departing president decided that she would be freed in May.

Manning was convicted in August 2013 of espionage and other offenses, after admitting to the leak of 700,000 sensitive military and diplomatic documents.

Thank you @BarackObama for giving me a chance. =,)

— Chelsea E. Manning (@xychelsea) January 19, 2017

“It has been my view that given she went to trial, that due process was carried out, that she took responsibility for her crime, that the sentence that she received was very disproportionate relative to what other leakers had received and that she had served a significant amount of time, that it made sense to commute and not pardon her sentence,” Obama said yesterday.

“Let’s be clear, Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence,” the president added. “I feel very comfortable that justice has been served.”