"It''s either him or it''s Manning"
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Asked in 2018 why Barack Obama had commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence, John Kiriakou answered that he could give the reason from the inside: "I actually know the answer from inside Obama's head, and I'll tell you why."

The approach through Biden

A very wealthy Greek-American businessman personally close to Joe Biden, then Vice President, approached him and asked whether he would put Kiriakou's case for a pardon to the president. "So I went to Delaware one night. I took the train and went to Biden's house, and this Greek-American took the train down from New York, and we met at Biden's house, and Biden agreed to go to the president the next night and lobby for me."

The following day the two men went to the White House. "I went home. I wasn't invited to the White House."

The answer

"When they came out, the Greek-American businessman called me and he said, 'you would have been so proud of Joe Biden. He went to the mat for you. He argued your case with everything that he had.' And then he said, ten minutes into it the president put up his hands and said, 'guys, I'm just not going to do this. It's either him or it's Manning.'"

What Kiriakou concludes from it

On his account the commutation that followed was a judgement about proportion rather than about justice. "And Manning got 35 years, and that's why Obama did it. Obama was not upset that Chelsea was convicted; Obama just believed that 35 was too much. So he didn't really commute Chelsea's sentence out of the goodness of his heart, or because of some pursuit of justice." He adds that Obama "was the enemy of transparency" who "waged a war on whistleblowers", and that "Chelsea just got lucky in the end."

He closes the account with a statistic about the same presidency: "in Barack Obama's final two years as president, the US pardon attorney recommended zero people for a pardon. Zero. There were commutations, but nobody was pardoned in the last two years." The lesson he draws is not partisan: "it makes no difference whether you're liberal or conservative or neoliberal or neoconservative. We have to elect people, regardless of party, for whom civil rights and civil liberties and human rights are important, because the deep state, or the federal bureaucracy, whatever you want to call it, isn't going to do it for us."

See also

- Chelsea Manning
- Barack Obama
- Joe Biden
- Kiriakou pardon request
- John Kiriakou
