Chelsea Manning says she will not testify on WikiLeaks, despite the risk of being arrested again

May 16, 2019, 18:06 UTC

By David K. Li

Chelsea Manning announced Thursday that she would again refuse to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the publication of documents by WikiLeaks.

Manning made this statement at a press conference before entering a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.

"No matter what happens today … whether I'm detained or not, I'm not going to bow to this grand jury," said the whistleblower. American army.

The threat of being locked up, says Manning, will have no effect on her.

"It does not scare me and do not bother me," she said. "I mean, I've been to jail already, I've been to jail, so trying to force me to appear before a grand jury will not work."

Earlier this month, Manning was released after 62 days of detention in a Virginia prison after refusing to testify before a previous grand jury in the WikiLeaks case.

She was released at the expiry of the term of this grand jury. Manning was then ordered to appear before another committee in Alexandria on Thursday.

Federal prosecutors in Alexandria recently unveiled a secret indictment issued in late 2017 against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was hiding at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London before his arrest by the British authorities last month. .

Manning, a former army intelligence analyst, said she was opposed to the secrecy of the grand jury process.

She also claims to have revealed everything she knows about WikiLeaks during her court martial, where she was found guilty of disclosing a wealth of military and diplomatic documents on the anti-secret website.

Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison and suspended for seven years before the then president, Barack Obama, commuted his sentence.

"The goal here is to re-examine the court martial," she said Thursday. "They did not like the result, I went out, it's a way to put myself back in isolation."