Defending espionage mercy

Photo: The Canadian Press

President Barack Obama firmly defended his decision to cut nearly three decades off convicted leaker Chelsea Manning's prison term Wednesday, arguing in his final White House news conference that the former Army intelligence analyst had served a "tough prison sentence" already.

Obama said he granted clemency to Manning because she had gone to trial, taken responsibility for her crime and received a sentence that was harsher than other leakers had received. He emphasized that he had merely commuted her sentence, not granted a pardon, which would have symbolically forgiven her for the crime.

"I feel very comfortable that justice has been served," Obama said.

Manning was convicted in 2013 of violating the Espionage Act and other crimes for leaking more than 700,000 classified documents while working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad. Formerly known as Bradley Manning, she declared as transgender after being sentenced to 35 years in prison. She had served more than six years before Obama commuted her sentence on Tuesday, with a release date set for May.

"The notion that the average person who was thinking about disclosing vital, classified information would think that it goes unpunished, I don't think would get that impression from the sentence that Chelsea Manning has served," Obama said.

Obama said he saw no contradiction in granting clemency to Manning even as he warns about Russia's hacking of the U.S. presidential campaign, in which stolen emails were released publicly by WikiLeaks. He said he wasn't motivated by WikiLeaks' recent pledge on Twitter that founder Julian Assange would agree to extradition to the U.S. if Obama commuted Manning's sentence.

"I don't pay much attention to Mr. Assange's tweets, so that wasn't a consideration," the president said.

Obama's comments came as he prepares to exit the presidency after eight years marked by major victories on health care, the economy and climate change, along with disappointments over his inability to achieve his goals on immigration, gun control and closing the Guantanamo Bay prison. He also wound down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but wrestled with other security threats posed by the Islamic State group and the Syria civil war he was unable to resolve.

Even many of Obama's proudest achievements, like the "Obamacare" health care overhaul, stand to be rolled back or undermined by President-elect Donald Trump, a shadow that hangs over Obama's legacy as he leaves office. The formal end comes Friday when Obama and Trump will motorcade together to the Capitol for Trump's swearing-in before Obama, then an ex-president, flies with his family to California for a vacation.

Appearing for the last time in front of the White House seal, Obama also defended his administration's rapprochement with Cuba and his eleventh-hour move to end the "wet foot, dry foot" policy that lets any Cuban who makes it to U.S. soil stay and become a legal resident. Ending the visa-free path was the latest development in a warming of relations that has included the easing of the U.S. economic embargo and the restoration of commercial flights between the U.S. and the small island nation.

"That was a carry-over of an old way of thinking that didn't make sense in this day and age, particularly as we're opening up travel between the two countries," Obama said of the "wet foot, dry foot" policy.

After leaving office, Obama plans to write a book, raise money to develop his presidential library, and work on a Democratic initiative to prepare for the 2020 round of congressional redistricting. Yet he said he plans to assume a low profile in the months after he leaves office, and to avoid commenting on politics on a daily basis.