“I have nothing to contribute to this case and I will not endanger myself or the activist communities I've organized with since leaving prison,” said Chelsea Manning of the investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images Legal Chelsea Manning fights grand jury subpoena seen as linked to Assange

Lawyers for convicted WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning are asking a federal court to block a grand jury subpoena she received in what her supporters believe is a federal investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Manning’s attorneys filed the motion Friday morning in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., a spokesperson for Manning said. The motion was put under seal and no information about it was immediately available from the court clerk’s office.


The subpoena sent to Manning in January does not specify any crimes or particular investigation, but it was issued at the request of a federal prosecutor assigned to handle the fallout from an error that led to the disclosure late last year of the strongest indication so far that Assange is the subject of sealed criminal charges in the U.S.

In a statement Friday, Manning blasted the process and said she plans to fight the subpoena, which was first reported by The New York Times.

POLITICO Playbook newsletter Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

“The grand jury process, mired in secrecy, is troubling. The proceedings take place behind closed doors, without a judge or defense attorney, which makes them susceptible to abuse,” Manning said. “I have nothing to contribute to this case, and I will not endanger myself or the activist communities I've organized with since leaving prison. I stand in solidarity with all grand jury resisters, who have refused to participate in this predatory and deceitful practice."

Manning’s supporters said Friday they suspect the effort to question her is retaliation for President Barack Obama’s decision — days before leaving office in 2017 — to commute Manning’s sentence for leaking hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, military reports, videos and other materials to WikiLeaks.

Obama triggered Manning’s release by reducing the 35-year prison sentence to a few months more than the six years she had already served. Republican lawmakers and some top national security officials opposed the commutation, but White House officials said the president thought the lengthy sentence a military judge issued after a court-martial was disproportionate to those imposed in other leak cases.

“The subpoena is likely a retaliatory move stemming from the very public executive resentment at Chelsea’s release,” a Manning spokesperson said.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria declined to comment.

Manning is currently due to appear before the grand jury there on Tuesday, but that could be delayed as a judge considers her motion to be excused from testifying.

Assange was not charged in Manning’s case, nor could he have been, since it was in a U.S. Army court with no jurisdiction over civilians. He was, however, discussed repeatedly during the trial. Evidence introduced at Manning’s court-martial suggested she was in online discussions with Assange about the materials and about how to obtain access to a secure military computer system, although his involvement was never definitively established.

Asked about the subpoena Friday, Assange lawyer Barry Pollack expressed frustration with prosecutors’ continued focus on Assange.

“It’s disappointing but not surprising that the government is continuing to pursue criminal charges against Julian Assange, apparently for his role in publishing truthful information about matters of great public interest,” Pollack said.

While many experts and Assange supporters have long suspected he faced some secret charge from U.S. prosecutors, those suspicions were confirmed last November when a terrorism researcher discovered a mention of sealed charges against Assange in a motion filed in an unrelated case in Alexandria. It appeared that a prosecutor inadvertently cut and pasted a passage from a filing in Assange’s sealed case into the unrelated one.

Prosecutors declined to comment on Assange’s status, beyond saying that the language about him was the product of an error. Press advocates sought to use the gaffe to gain access to whatever charges are pending against Assange, but a judge rebuffed that effort.

Assange has been the focus of U.S. investigators for about a decade, with attention ramping up in 2010, after WikiLeaks published more than 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables and military logs — many of them classified. Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, eventually was charged with making the leaks and convicted.

Assange has also figured in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Prosecutors have alleged that WikiLeaks obtained emails of Democratic Party officials from Russian government-backed hackers and later posted them online.

Assange, who has been holed up at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 under a grant of asylum, has not been publicly charged in that case. However, he has been the focus of sharp verbal attacks by U.S. lawmakers and Trump administration officials, who have rejected Assange’s claims to be a journalist.

“It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is — a nonstate hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in 2017 while serving as CIA director. “We have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us. To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.”

