Julian Assange has claimed Barack Obama only showed clemency to Chelsea Manning to annoy him.
Assange said that Manning’s pending release is really an act of spite, made after he offered to submit to US extradition if the leaker were freed.
But when the whistleblower’s sentence was commuted, moving his release date forward from 2045 to May of this year, Assange changed tack – deciding that he would not necessarily come back after all.
He told Australian TV show The Project that his return to US jurisdiction is in fact “contingent on some kind of deal”, and that doing otherwise would make him “a complete idiot”.
In an appearance Tuesday night, Assange described the thinking behind Manning’s commutation as: “It is going to make life hard for Assange because either he will be extradited to the US or we will show him [to be] a liar.”
He said that Obama then denied any link between his decision and the Wikileaks founder’s offer in order to “look tough”.
Assange continues to live in the London embassy of Ecuador, where he has been for four and a half years, hiding from legal action in Sweden.
Manning’s commutation was one of a series by Obama just before he left office.
The last ones were enacted on January 19th, his penultimate day in office.
Obama commuted 330 sentences in a single day – the most ever – bringing his presidential total to an unprecedented 1,715.