Chelsea Manning, the former US army soldier jailed for giving sensitive documents to WikiLeaks, has filed documents to run for the US Senate, the Washington Post reported.

Ms Manning, a former intelligence expert previously known as Bradley Manning, was released from military prison in 2017 after Barack Obama waived her sentence.

The 30-year-old would be taking on the incumbent Ben Cardin, a 74-year-old Democrat who has held the seat for more than a decade.

Miss Manning was arrested in May 2010, while serving with the US army in Iraq, after she confessed to a computer hacker, Adrian Lamo, that she was the source of Wikileaks’ documents.

Wikileaks had published hundreds of thousands of documents that Miss Manning had downloaded from military computers – among them the Iraq and Afghan war logs, diplomatic cables and Guantanamo Bay files.