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Chelsea Manning says she doesn’t know if she’ll be jailed again after refusing to testify about WikiLeaks

Posted at 5:06 AM, May 13, 2019
and last updated 2019-05-13 05:06:50-04

Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, recently released from jail after refusing to testify about her disclosure of military and diplomatic secrets to WikiLeaks in 2010, said Sunday she doesn’t know if she’ll be sent back to jail after another planned refusal to answer questions before a grand jury this week. 

“We don’t (know if I’ll be jailed again),” Manning told CNN’s Brian Stelter on “Reliable Sources.” “I think that we have a much stronger case in terms of like the legal objections, which the previous judge didn’t — refused to even hear. He refused to even hear or act on the motions. He just simply placed me in contempt and ignored our motions.”

Manning and her lawyers have indicated that she would again refuse to testify in response to a separate subpoena received while she was detained. The subpoena would have her appear before a different grand jury this week to answer the same questions she previously refused to answer, Manning said.

“They’ve already stipulated that they want to ask the same questions,” she said. “So this is not about — this is not about anything new. They’re not even asking anything — they’re not asking anything new. I’ve already laid all of this out.”

During another part of her interview, Manning, who served seven years in prison for the massive leak, said prosecutors have asked questions about “disclosures and how the things are disclosed and why they’re disclosed, as opposed to how it was obtained.”

Manning was released last week from a detention center in Virginia after serving nearly two months there. Her jail sentence came after she objected to questioning in a grand jury appearance in March that was apparently part of a continued effort by federal prosecutors investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. She was subsequently held in contempt, and a federal appeals court rejected her argument for release — that her rights were violated by the subpoena proceedings and the federal prosecutors purportedly seeking to entrap her — in April.

Manning told Stelter that her lawyers plan to mount a legal challenge should a judge again hold her in contempt for refusing to answer additional questions when she appears in court this week.

“It’s going to depend on — we certainly have a motion to quash. We’re certainly going to raise every single legal challenge that we have. We have a very strong case. And we had a strong case previously. But now we have additional evidence as to what our case is,” Manning said.