Chelsea Manning Freed in WikiLeaks Case, but for How Long?

FALLS CHURCH, Va.—Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was released from a northern Virginia jail Thursday after a two-month stay for refusing to testify to a grand jury.

Manning spent 62 days at the Alexandria Detention Center on civil contempt charges after she refused to answer questions to a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.

Her lawyers fear her freedom may be short-lived, though. She was released only because the grand jury’s term expired. Before she left the jail, she received another subpoena demanding her testimony on May 16 to a new grand jury.

Her lawyers say she will again refuse to answer questions and could again face another term of incarceration.

Manning served seven years in a military prison for leaking a trove of documents to WikiLeaks before then-President Barack Obama commuted the remainder of her 35-year sentence.

Earlier this week, Manning’s lawyers filed court papers arguing that she should not be jailed for civil contempt because she has proved that she will stick to her principles and won’t testify no matter how long she’s jailed.

Federal law only allows a recalcitrant witness to be jailed on civil contempt if there’s a chance that the incarceration will coerce the witness into testifying. If a judge were to determine that incarcerating Manning were punitive rather than coercive, Manning would not be jailed.

“At this point, given the sacrifices she has already made, her strong principles, her strong and growing support community, and the disgrace attendant to her capitulation, it is inconceivable that Chelsea Manning will ever change her mind about her refusal to cooperate with the grand jury,” her lawyers wrote.

Manning filed an eight-page statement with the court on Monday, outlining her resolve. She wrote that “cooperation with this grand jury is simply not an option. Doing so would mean throwing away all of my principles, accomplishments, sacrifices, and erase decades of my reputation — an obvious impossibility,” she wrote.

She also said she was suffering disproportionately in jail because of physical problems related with inadequate follow-up care to gender-reassignment surgery.