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Chelsea Manning Asks Obama to Cut Sentence to Time Served

chelsea manning
torbakhopper
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A transgender soldier serving 35 years at a Kansas military prison for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks is asking President Barack Obama to commute her sentence to the 6 1/2 years she has already served.

Chelsea Manning says in her application for commutation that she's a "far different person" than she was in 2010, when her name was Bradley Manning and she was struggling to fit in as a male.

A military court convicted Manning in 2013 of leaking more than 700,000 secret military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks. She has acknowledged guilt but says she wanted to raise public awareness about the impact of war on civilians.

She's imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth.

Supporters argue the sentence was too harsh for something that caused little more than military embarrassment.

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