WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning asked a federal appeals court to reconsider the contempt ruling keeping her behind bars following the government’s unsealing Thursday of a related criminal indictment charging the website’s founder, Julian Assange.
Lawyers representing Manning, a former Army analyst convicted in 2013 of crimes related to WikiLeaks, cited the Department of Justice’s newly acknowledged case against the site’s longtime publisher in a filing entered in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals hours after Mr. Assange was arrested in London and promptly charged by U.S. prosecutors in connection with a criminal indictment previously sealed since March 2018.
Manning, 31, was found in contempt of court and jailed more than a month ago for refusing to cooperate with a subpoena compelling her appearance in front of a federal grand jury empaneled as part of the Justice Department’s lengthy WikiLeaks probe. Challenging that ruling in a 21-page memorandum, Manning’s lawyers raised concerns that prosecutors abused their powers by demanding her testimony in the case despite already obtaining an indictment an entire year earlier.
“Where, as here, it is evident that a witness had nothing to add to a criminal investigation, and where repetitious questioning is in and of itself compelling evidence suggesting that the prosecutor is using the grand jury as a mechanism for pretrial discovery, the Court must, at a minimum, require that the government establish that the subpoena was not issued for an improper purpose,” Manning’s legal team wrote.
Manning’s lawyers cited as precedent a case settled by the Fourth Circuit in 1985, U.S. v. Moss, which established that “prosecutors cannot utilize the grand jury solely or even primarily for the purpose of gathering evidence in pending litigation.”
“Given the Assange indictment, there is now literally no doubt whatsoever that this concern, raised multiple times, was grounded in fact, and was sufficient to have rebutted the presumption of grand jury regularity,” Manning’s lawyers wrote. “The District Court ought to have required at least some assurances from the government. Instead, they dismissed out of hand the entirely legitimate evidence and concerns of a grand jury witness with substantial rights at stake.”
Manning was arrested in 2010 and later convicted of crimes related to supplying WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of U.S. military and diplomatic documents. She served around 7 years in military prison prior to having most of her sentence commuted by former President Barack Obama, but she has been back behind bars since being found in contempt March 8 by a federal court judge in Alexandria, Virginia. She asked the Fourth Circuit last week to vacate the contempt ruling, and her latest concerns were raised in a memo filed in response to a brief entered by prosecutors April 9.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria declined to comment on Manning’s appeal.
Mr. Assange, a 47-year-old Australian, lived for nearly seven years inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London prior to being forcefully removed earlier Thursday as a consequence of Quito rescinding his asylum status. Federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., subsequently unsealed the indictment charging him with one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking for allegedly attempting in 2010 to help Manning circumvent security measures meant to protect Department of Defense computers.
An extradition hearing for Mr. Assange has been set for May 2.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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