President Obama commuted the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning Tuesday in an 11th-hour surprise, allowing the convicted leaker of US Army secrets to leave prison nearly three decades early.

Manning, a transgender ex-Army intelligence analyst formerly known as Bradley Manning, is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified government and military documents to the website WikiLeaks.

Obama had earlier slammed WikiLeaks, founded by Julian Assange, for publishing emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta. Manning pleaded with Obama last November to commute her sentence to time served.  “I am not asking for a pardon on my conviction,” she wrote in a November statement.

She is expected to be released May 17 after serving seven years. The move could have widespread consequences — as Assange had agreed to do time in prison if the president acted. “If Obama grants Manning clemency, Assange will agree to US prison in exchange — despite its clear unlawfulness,” WikiLeaks, Assange’s organization, tweeted on Sep. 15, 2016.

I think it is good that she won't have to stay in jail for the rest of her life.

oh you have got to be fucking kidding. granted, I don't mind the governments secrets being brought out into the open (so long as no one is physicaly harmed from it), but to pull this out of his ass at the last minute just to screw over Assange? a man who should be hailed as a hero to the American people?

fuck you Obama. fuck you and your whole god damn presidency.

man that felt good!

well at least that dark cloud (not a racial slur I swear.) is out of the white house now. I don't care what you think of trump, but ANYONE has GOT to be better than OBAMA!

Memo said, January 21, 2017, 09:51:22 am

cheddarsword said, January 21, 2017, 09:39:20 am

oh you have got to be fucking kidding. granted, I don't mind the governments secrets being brought out into the open (so long as no one is physicaly harmed from it), but to pull this out of his ass at the last minute just to screw over Assange? a man who should be hailed as a hero to the American people?

fuck you Obama. fuck you and your whole god damn presidency.

man that felt good!

well at least that dark cloud (not a racial slur I swear.) is out of the white house now. I don't care what you think of trump, but ANYONE has GOT to be better than OBAMA!

Are you mad they letting him out?

no, i'm angry at the reason why. Obama did it so that Assange would surrender. has to be the reason. I can't think of any other reason that a president would let a "leaker of government cover ups/lies" loose.

frankly, i'm GLAD they let them loose. I just wish he'd done it because he knew how fucked up our government is and thought he was doing the right thing.

but let's face it. we're talking about the guy who paid a terrorist ransom for a traitor here. good morals are out the window.

also, if I may, you called them a "him". if i'm not mistaken, in the transgender community, is it not considered an offense to refer to a person as the gender they used to be? I ask, because frankly, I don't know.

Nobody is an asshole here for calling chelsea manning a dude.

" Chelsea Manning is a trans woman"

Guys that take hormones for a while are still guys, not girls.

still, it is a bit fishy. you can't deny that there's at least the possibility that Obama had a hidden agenda behind their release.

and okay, ransom might not have been it. but he did negotiate with a terrorist. he paid cash for the release of a traitor. call it what you want, but that's what happened, and it goes against America's code of ethics... or what's left of it anyway.