Chelsea Manning, the former intelligence analyst for the military convicted for disclosing classified information, is refusing to cooperate with a grand jury probe on WikiLeaks, court papers showed Monday.
In an affidavit filed by Manning’s lawyers in the Eastern District of Virginia, she explains her refusal to answer grand jury questions — a decision for which she was found in contempt of court and jailed March 8.
“After two months of confinement, and using every legal mechanism available so far, I can — without any hesitation — state that nothing that will convince me to testify before this or any other grand jury for that matter,” she said.
She also claimed she was housed separately from the general population initially, harming her mental health. And Manning said she’s also unable to get proper treatment and medical care after undergoing gender confirmation surgery in October.
She said the demand to testify before the grand jury “forces me to choose between an unethical decision and suffering intimate and permanent consequences for doing the right thing.”
“I am not willing to compromise for my own physical benefit,” she said.
Attorneys for Manning also filed a motion Monday requesting that she be released from the federal facility.
"The only lawful purpose for her confinement is to coerce her to give testimony," the filing reads.
Manning was convicted in 2013 of leaking classified materials to WikiLeaks, and served seven years of a 35-year sentence before then-President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.
A recently unsealed criminal charge against WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange alleges he sought to help Manning crack the password to a computer on a Defense Department network containing classified materials.
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