Former Army intelligence officer Chelsea Manning has been released from the Alexandria, Va., jail, where she was held after refusing to testify in the grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, her lawyers said.
She was released because that grand jury has expired. She has been subpoenaed to appear before a new grand jury on Thursday and may be returned to jail if she again refuses to testify, her support team said in a statement.
"Chelsea will continue to refuse to answer questions, and will use every available legal defense to prove ... that she has just cause for her refusal to give testimony," the statement read.
A spokesman with the U.S. attorney's office in the Eastern District of Virginia could not immediately be reached for comment.
Manning shared hundreds of thousands of classified government documents with WikiLeaks in 2010, while serving as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq. Assange, currently jailed in London after seven years in asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy in Britain, is accused of conspiring to help Manning break a password that would allow anonymous access to a U.S. Defense Department computer.
Manning was initially subpoenaed in January to go before a grand jury but refused to appear, rejecting an offer of immunity from prosecution in both military and federal court. She was jailed for civil contempt of court in March.
While she failed to quash the subpoena, Manning filed an affidavit this week saying she will never cooperate and therefore further incarceration is pointless.
"The idea I hold the keys to my own cell is an absurd one, as I face the prospect of suffering either way due to this unnecessary and punitive subpoena: I can either go to jail or betray my principles," she said in a letter to the court. "The latter exists as a much worse prison than the government can construct."
Court filings indicate prosecutors believe Manning has offered inconsistent information regarding her relationship with Assange. In a criminal complaint unsealed in April, they note that she claimed in military court that she was never sure if she was speaking directly to the WikiLeaks founder. But in conversations with the hacker who turned her in to authorities, she said she had confirmed Assange's identity.
A Section on 05/10/2019