Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, asked President Obama to pardon him for handing over thousands of secret documents to WikiLeaks.
Manning's lawyer David. E. Coombs filed the formal request for presidential pardon on Tuesday, nearly two weeks after Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
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Coombs asked Obama to either reduce her sentence to time Manning has already served since her arrest in 2010, or for a full presidential pardon. In either case, Manning would be free to go.
In the request's cover letter (.PDF), Coombs wrote that all Manning did was share documents with "a journalist," stressing that Manning's actions didn't harm the United States and that her punishment is disproportionate:
The length of Private Manning's sentence is one that we would expect for someone who disclosed information in order to harm the United States or who disclosed information for monetary gain. Private Manning did neither. Instead, he disclosed information that he believed could spark a meaningful public debate on the costs of war, and specifically on how we value human life.
Manning wrote a long, emotional explanation of her actions in the pardon request (.PDF), echoing her lawyers' words to justify her actions.
"The decisions I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in," Manning wrote.
Manning goes on to explain that she enlisted in the army to defend her country after 9/11, which, she argues, was an event that forced the U.S. to change its methods to fight an untraditional enemy. While she initially agreed with those methods, she explained that after getting to Iraq where she read "secret military reports on a daily basis," she "started to question the morality of what we were doing."
"It was at this time that I realized that in our efforts to meet the risks posed to us by the enemy, we had forgotten our Humanity," she wrote.
And that's why she decided to leak those documents, a decision she took "out love for my country and a sense of duty to others," she wrote. Her actions were in an effort to "shine a light on the death of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture, Guantanamo, and countless other acts in the name of our war on terror."
However, if Obama denies her plea for pardon, Manning is ready to serve her time.
“If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in free society," she wrote. "I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly 'conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all [women and] men are created equal...'"
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