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It's no pardon, but it will do:
President Obama has put Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst serving a 35-year sentence for leaking classified material, on his short list for a possible commutation, a Justice Department source told NBC News. A decision could come [...] for Manning, who has tried to commit suicide twice this year and went on a hunger strike in a bid for gender reassignment surgery.
"I have more hope right now than I have the entire time since she was sentenced," Manning's aunt, Deborah Manning, told NBC News.
[...] Manning's supporters believe the harshness of the sentence can be traced to another leaker; the scandal around former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was erupting around the same time. "I really believe the judge felt she needed to send some sort of message," the aunt said. "I think in a way she was a scapegoat for Edward Snowden." Snowden, who has asked Obama for clemency, tweeted his support of Manning shortly after NBC News' report about the commutation decision aired on TODAY on Wednesday morning.
Four former and current Army intelligence officers told NBC News the documents leaked by Manning pale in significance to highly classified top secret material released by Snowden. The officers, who would not allow their names to be used, said the Manning sentence seems excessive.
Also at The Hill.
Time magazine adds:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will agree to be extradited to the U.S. if President Obama grants whistle-blower Chelsea Manning clemency before his term ends on Jan. 20, the organization has said.
In a tweet posted on the group's official account Thursday, WikiLeaks said Assange would not oppose extradition to the U.S. "despite [the] clear unconstitutionality" of any potential criminal complaints that the Justice Department may have against the whistle-blower website, if U.S. Army private Manning is released.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @05:23PM
The pee stuff makes for an endless stream of late-night show jokes and puns. My favorite is PEEOTUS...
But the really damning claims aren't about the hookers, its all the other stuff about contacts and coordination between his campaign and russia.
No 4chan troll has hoaxed that.
There is plenty of hard, factual reasons to believe Trump has been compromised. Over the last decade he's been complicit in laundering money of oligarchs and other crime lords from former soviet states. Putin's got a complicated relationship with the oligarchs. When he came to power he made a deal with them - you stay out of politics and I won't re-nationalize all the stuff you stole from the people. But tension between powers is inevitable and occasionally an oligarch decides to test [wikipedia.org] Putin. [wikipedia.org] So Putin is always looking for leverage on the oligarchs in case he has to put one down. Trump's involvement with them and their money made him a potential asset. So it has long been in Putin's interest to recruit Trump - and by 'recruit' I mean blackmail. The fact that years later Trump would become a serious candidate for President is just serendipity from Putin's point of view.
Here's a summary of much of the reporting on Trump's financial ties to crime in former soviet union satellites. [dailykos.com] Don't let the fact that the summary is published on the DailyKOS dissuade you, all the source articles it references are from the much more sober Financial Times. I think the FT is paywalled, but I get through all the links without a problem - try incognito mode if you can't. There is also this comprehensive examination of Trump's dubious foreign connections [the-american-interest.com] from The American Interest, a deeply conservative foreign-policy mag.