Why was Chelsea Manning pardoned by Barack Obama and what was the former US Army private convicted of?
BARACK Obama handed jailed Wikileaks source Chelsea Manning a reprieve by commuting her 35 year sentence.
The former US Army private will now be freed later this year instead of her original 2045 release date.
Transgender Manning - formerly known as Bradley - released more than 750,000 classified documents to Julian Assange's Wikileaks site in 2010.
Who is Chelsea Manning?
Manning served as an intelligence analyst for the US Army in Iraq between 2009 and 2010.
During that time, she had access to millions of classified documents relating to American action in the Iraq War.
Among them were videos showing US airstrikes that left civilians and journalists dead.
Throughout early 2010, Manning released hundreds of thousands of documents to Wikileaks - a publisher of classified information run by Australian Julian Assange.
How was Manning caught?
The army private began to reveal his actions to American hacker Adrian Lamo via an instant messaging app in 2010.
Lamo later revealed the extent of the leaks to US authorities leading to Manning's arrest in May 2010.
She was charged under the Espionage Act and accused of "aiding the enemy".
Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013.
Placed in solitary confinement, she has been considered a suicide risk.
Manning says she has always felt she was a woman and began to identify as such in 2010.
In 2015, she was authorised to begin undergoing hormone treatment and was last year granted a request for gender transition surgery.
Why did Barack Obama pardon Chelsea Manning?
Obama announced he would commute Manning's sentence days before he left office in a move that will see her released in May.
He was among 209 people who had sentences commuted by the outgoing president.
Incoming president Donald Trump had previously advocated the death penalty for the leaks, and Obama's controversial decision attracted a mixed response.
Human rights groups welcomed the move, Amnesty International describing Manning's commutation as "long overdue".
However, Trump's Republican colleague John McCain described it as a "grave mistake" that could "encourage further acts of espionage".
Paul Ryan, the House speaker, said the pardoning was "outrageous" and that "Chelsea Manning's treachery put American lives at risk".
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