Sandy MaloneAlexandria, VA – Convicted felon Chelsea Manning is back behind bars after she refused to testify before a grand jury about her interactions with WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.
Bradley Manning, who became Chelsea the day after she was sentenced, was a U.S. Army intelligence analyst who leaked massive amounts of American military and diplomatic secrets to WikiLeaks.
The huge leak of government secrets led to political turmoil across the world and prompted many people to call for Manning’s execution for treason.
Manning was convicted of violations of the espionage acts in 2013, and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
But President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence shortly before he left office in January of 2017, and she was released four months later.
Manning served time in the men’s prison at Fort Leavenworth. She had a rough time in prison, and twice tried to kill herself.
In September 2016, Manning went on a five-day hunger strike which ended when the Army agreed to provide her with gender change surgery.
Since her release, Manning has continued to publicly behave in an unstable manner.
She announced she was running for U.S. Senate in Maryland in January of 2018, but by June of the same year she was threatening suicide in tweets from a London hotel room.
Recently, Manning was called to testify before a grand jury investigating Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and she refused.
On Tuesday, a judge denied her attorney’s motion challenging Manning’s subpoena, and ordered the felon to appear.
Manning posted a statement on Twitter that said she would be facing “a sealed contempt hearing for refusing to testify at a secret grand jury over my 2010 disclosures.”
She said prosecutors had granted her immunity, but that she had already provided the information when she was court-martialed in 2013.
Manning wrote that she answered each question she was asked with “I object to the question and refuse to answer on the grounds that the question is in violation of my First, Fourth, and Sixth Amendment, and other statutory rights.”
Not satisfied with the convicted traitor’s refusal to answer questions, U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton told Manning on Friday that she was in contempt, Business Insider reported.
He ordered 31-year-old Manning jailed “either until you purge yourself or the end of the life of the grand jury.”
“I don’t believe in the grand jury process; I don’t believe in the secrecy of this,” Manning announced before the ruling, according to Business Insider.
Grand juries have be known to run for a long as a year and a half, NBC News reported.
Her attorneys called Manning’s arrest “an act of tremendous cruelty,” Business Insider reported.
They said her history of mental health issues in prison should be considered, and that she had previously been mistreated as a transgender woman by the justice system.
However, the record showed that Manning’s mental health problems have continued outside of prison walls.
Police performed a welfare check on former Army analyst on May 27, 2018 after she posted two suicide threats on social media.
Montgomery County police received “several calls” from concerned parties who had read Manning’s tweets, Montgomery County Police Captain Paul Starks told The Intercept.
In her first tweet, the 30-year-old transgender activist posted a picture of herself standing on the ledge of a building captioned with the words “im sorry.”
She followed that up with a more detailed tweet, The Washington Times reported.
I’m sorry – I tried – I’m sorry I let you all down. I’m not really cut out for this world – I tried adapting to this world out here but I failed you – I couldn’t do this anymore … I tried and I’m sorry about my failure.”
The tweets were quickly deleted, but not before people became very worried about her well-being.
After receiving calls from some of Manning’s Twitter followers, officers looked up her address and went to check on her.
When nobody answered her door, they appeared to gain entry to her apartment using a key provided by building management or another source to make sure the former military prisoner was not in need of medical care.
Instead of thanking the police officers for their efforts in tracking down the apartment address, Manning and her friends who called the police later complained about the officers’ entry into her apartment.