The Chelsea Manning Court-Martial: The Largest Leak in U.S. History

The single most important thing this case decided was not how long the sentence would be. It was a line between two crimes that look identical from the outside. An Army intelligence analyst copied roughly three-quarters of a million classified files and handed them to a website that published them to the entire world. The government called that “aiding the enemy,” a charge that can carry the death penalty, and lost. It then called the same conduct espionage, and won. Understanding why one theory failed where the other succeeded is the whole legal payload of the Chelsea Manning court-martial, and it turns on a question the volume of the leak never answered: who, in the eyes of the law, received the secrets.

What happened

Chelsea Manning was a junior intelligence analyst with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, deployed in late 2009 to Forward Operating Base Hammer outside Baghdad, where her duties gave her access to classified military networks (United States v. Manning trial record; The New York Times, Aug. 21, 2013). Over the following months she downloaded and transmitted to WikiLeaks a body of material that prosecutors and the press described as the largest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in American history to that point: more than 700,000 documents, files, and videos in all (Associated Press, Aug. 21, 2013). The trove included roughly 400,000 Iraq War field reports, about 90,000 reports from the Afghanistan war, more than 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables, detainee assessment files from Guantanamo Bay, and combat video, among it a 2007 Baghdad airstrike clip that WikiLeaks released under the title “Collateral Murder” (The New York Times, July 30, 2013; United States v. Manning).

Manning was identified after confiding about the disclosures in online chats to a former computer hacker, who reported the conversations to the authorities (The New York Times, July 30, 2013). She was arrested in Iraq in May 2010 and held in pretrial confinement for more than three years, a stretch that included a period of harsh conditions at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, that the military judge later found warranted a credit against any sentence (Associated Press, Jan. 8, 2013). At the time of the conduct and the early proceedings Manning was known by the name Bradley Manning; the day after sentencing in 2013 she stated that she is a woman and asked to be known as Chelsea Manning, the name and pronouns used throughout this account (The New York Times, Aug. 22, 2013). The court-martial was held at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Manning did not contest having sent the files. In February 2013 she pleaded guilty to a set of lesser offenses that by themselves exposed her to as much as twenty years in confinement, while disputing the most serious charges the government still intended to prove (The New York Times, Feb. 28, 2013). She elected to be tried by a military judge alone rather than by a panel of members, placing the verdict in the hands of Colonel Denise Lind (The Washington Post, July 30, 2013).

The legal lesson

The charge that made this case a capital matter was aiding the enemy, brought under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Manning court-martial is the case where the most extreme version of the exposure that unauthorized-disclosure offenses carry was tested and rejected.

Aiding the enemy is not, at its core, about the volume of information released. It is about a relationship between the discloser and an enemy. The government’s theory was novel and aggressive: because Manning released the files to a public website, and because hostile groups such as al-Qaeda could read a public website along with everyone else, she had given intelligence to the enemy “through indirect means” (The Washington Post, July 30, 2013). The problem for the prosecution was the mental element. Article 104 requires proof that the accused knowingly gave intelligence to the enemy, and the prosecution could not establish that Manning acted with the knowledge or intent the charge demands, as opposed to acting to inform the public (The New York Times, July 30, 2013). On July 30, 2013, Judge Lind found Manning not guilty of aiding the enemy, the gravest charge against her (CNN, July 30, 2013). Had it succeeded, the theory would have meant that publishing classified material to the press could itself be treated as delivering it to any enemy who happened to be reading, a result press-freedom advocates warned would criminalize a vast range of disclosure (The New York Times, July 30, 2013).

What the same conduct did establish was espionage. The Espionage Act, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 793, reaches a person who, having lawful access to national defense information, transmits it to someone not entitled to receive it; unlike Article 104, it does not require any link to an enemy or proof of intent to injure the United States in the foreign-power sense. Manning was convicted on six counts under the Espionage Act, along with five counts of theft of government property and two counts of computer fraud, and other military offenses (The Washington Post, July 30, 2013; The New York Times, July 30, 2013). That is the doctrinal heart of the case. The identical act of downloading and sending the files was not enough to prove the enemy-facing crime, but was more than enough to prove the disclosure crime, because the disclosure crime asks only whether protected national defense information reached someone not authorized to have it. The recipient being the public, rather than a foreign government, is exactly what sank the capital charge and left the espionage counts standing.

That same recipient question separates Manning’s case from classic espionage, where a service member sells secrets to a foreign power. In the case of John Walker, a Navy chief warrant officer spent nearly two decades passing cryptographic material to the Soviet Union and received a life sentence. Walker delivered defense secrets to a hostile government for money; Manning delivered them to the public out of a stated belief that the country should see them. Both compromised enormous quantities of protected information, yet the legal outcomes diverged sharply, and the reason is the foreign-power element that was present in Walker and absent in Manning.

Outcome and why it matters

On August 21, 2013, Judge Lind sentenced Manning to 35 years in confinement, reduction in rank to Private E-1, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and a dishonorable discharge (The New York Times, Aug. 21, 2013). It was the longest sentence ever imposed in the United States for leaking classified information to the press, far exceeding the terms handed to earlier leakers (Associated Press, Aug. 21, 2013). Prosecutors had asked for at least 60 years; the defense had emphasized Manning’s youth, isolation, and stated motive of prompting public debate (The Washington Post, Aug. 21, 2013).

The story did not end at the sentence, and its final lesson is about a power that sits entirely outside the court-martial system. On January 17, 2017, in one of his last acts in office, President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s 35-year sentence, leaving the conviction intact but cutting the confinement to roughly seven years total (NPR, Jan. 17, 2017). Manning was released on May 17, 2017 (NPR, May 17, 2017). Commutation is not acquittal and not a pardon: it reduces or ends a punishment while the underlying conviction stands, and it is a constitutional power of the president that no military court controls. Explaining the decision, Obama said the 35-year term was “very disproportionate relative to what other leakers had received” and that Manning had already served a significant amount of time (NPR, Jan. 17, 2017). The Army Court of Criminal Appeals separately upheld the conviction in 2018, rejecting the argument that the Espionage Act was unconstitutionally vague as applied to her (United States v. Manning, Army Ct. Crim. App., 2018).

The enduring value of the Manning court-martial is the distinction it drew so cleanly. The volume of a leak does not determine the crime. What determines the crime is what the information was and to whom it went. Disclosure to the public proved espionage but not aiding the enemy, because the enemy-facing charge needs an enemy-facing intent the record could not supply. A separate constitutional actor, the president, then overrode the sentence the military system had imposed, a reminder that the harshest court-martial outcome is never the last word.

Sources

• United States v. Manning, general court-martial, Fort Meade, Maryland (charges, plea, verdict, and sentence); United States v. Manning, Army Court of Criminal Appeals (2018) (conviction upheld; Espionage Act vagueness argument rejected).
• The New York Times, “Manning Is Acquitted of Aiding the Enemy,” July 30, 2013 (acquittal on Article 104; convictions under the Espionage Act and related offenses; “indirect means” theory).
• The Washington Post, “Judge finds Manning not guilty of aiding the enemy, guilty of espionage,” July 30, 2013 (verdict; bench trial before Col. Denise Lind; six Espionage Act counts, theft, computer fraud).
• CNN, “Bradley Manning acquitted of aiding the enemy but guilty of espionage violations,” July 30, 2013 (not guilty of the gravest charge).
• The New York Times, “Soldier Sentenced to 35 Years in Leaks Case,” Aug. 21, 2013 (sentence: 35 years, reduction to E-1, forfeiture, dishonorable discharge).
• Associated Press, Aug. 21, 2013 (largest leak in U.S. history; more than 700,000 documents; longest leak sentence to the press).
• The Washington Post, Aug. 21, 2013 (prosecution request; defense mitigation).
• The New York Times, “Private Manning’s Court-Martial Begins” / Feb. 28, 2013 (guilty plea to lesser offenses; up to twenty years).
• The New York Times, “Manning, Facing Prison for Leaks, Says She Is Female,” Aug. 22, 2013 (name and pronoun statement).
• Associated Press, Jan. 8, 2013 (sentence credit for harsh pretrial confinement at Quantico).
• NPR, “Obama Commutes Sentence Of Chelsea Manning,” Jan. 17, 2017 (commutation to roughly seven years; Obama’s “disproportionate” statement).
• NPR, “After Serving 7 Years Of A 35-Year Sentence, Chelsea Manning Walks Free,” May 17, 2017 (release date).

This article explains military law for general information and is not legal advice.