[21] An Article 32 hearing, presided over by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Almanza, was convened on December 16, 2011, at Fort Meade, Maryland, to determine whether to proceed to a court martial.

[23] The lead prosecutor, Captain Fein, argued that Manning had given enemies "unfettered access" to the material and had displayed an "absolute indifference" to classified information.

After Manning's arrest, detectives searched a basement room in Potomac, Maryland, and found an SD card they say contained the Afghan and Iraq War logs, along with a message to WikiLeaks.

[25] Lieutenant Colonel Almanza heard from two army investigators, Special Agent David Shaver, head of the digital forensics and research branch of the army's Computer Crime Investigative Unit (CCIU), and Mark Johnson, a digital forensics contractor from ManTech International, who works for the CCIU.

Two of the chat handles, which used the Berlin Chaos Computer Club's domain (ccc.de), had names associated with them, Julian Assange and Nathaniel Frank.

This is possibly one of the most significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century assymmetric warfare.

"[28] Obama was named because of an April 2011 statement[29][30][31][32][33] that Manning "broke the law":[34] The defense requests the presence of [redacted] in order to discuss the issue of Unlawful Command Influence (UCI).

Coombs asked for the dismissal of any charge related to the use of unauthorized software, arguing that Manning's unit had been "lawless ... when it comes to information assurance."

Defense lawyers argued that the superiors had failed to provide adequate counseling, and had not taken disciplinary action or revoked Manning's security clearance.

[36] After the hearing, in January 2012, Coombs filed a request to depose six witnesses, whose names were redacted in the application, and who are believed to have been involved in classifying the leaked videos.

Petitioners included Julian Assange, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Chase Madar, author of The Passion of Bradley Manning (2011), and Glenn Greenwald of Salon.

She pleaded guilty to 10 criminal counts in connection with the material leaked, which included videos of airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan in which civilians were killed, logs of military incident reports, assessment files of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and a quarter-million cables from American diplomats stationed around the world.

Manning read a statement recounting how she joined the military, became an intelligence analyst in Iraq, decided that certain files should become known to the American public to prompt a wider debate about foreign policy, downloaded them from a secure computer network and then ultimately uploaded them to WikiLeaks.

Manning then copied the files and uploaded them to WikiLeaks, through its website, using a directory the group designated as a "cloud drop box" server.

[48] Opening for the prosecution, Captain Joe Morrow accused Manning of having "harvested" hundreds of thousands of documents from secure networks, then making them available within hours to the US's enemies by dumping them on the Internet: "This is a case about what happens when arrogance meets access to classified information," he said.

[5] On July 2, at the trial's 14th day of sessions, prosecutors rested their case, having presented testimony from 80 witnesses and evidence showing that Manning's training repeatedly instructed her to not give classified information to unauthorized people.

Attempting to undercut the most serious charge against Manning—aiding the enemy—defense lawyers called Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler, who testified that until WikiLeaks started publishing the material Manning leaked, even the Pentagon apparently viewed the anti-secrecy website as a legitimate journalistic enterprise.

In its rebuttal case, the prosecution entered three tweets from WikiLeaks that Manning may have viewed to show that the organization was not a legitimate journalistic enterprise.

[53] On July 25, chief prosecutor Maj. Ashden Fein delivered the government's closing argument, portraying Manning as an "anarchist" who sought to "make a splash" by providing vast archives of secret documents to WikiLeaks.

Fein contended that Manning's "wholesale and indiscriminate compromise of hundreds of thousands of classified documents" for release by the WikiLeaks staff, whom he called "essentially information anarchists," was not an ordinary journalistic disclosure but a bid for "notoriety, although in a clandestine form."

Coombs said his client released only files she believed would cause no harm yet spark debate and prompt change, and that if Manning had not been selective, she would have leaked much more.

Playing excerpts from the Baghdad helicopter attack ("Collateral Murder") video that Manning admitted supplying to WikiLeaks, Coombs told Judge Lind: "When the court looks at this, the defense requests that you not disengage, that you not look at this from the eyes of 'this happened on a battlefield.'

Manning was acquitted of aiding the enemy by knowingly giving out intelligence through indirect means, and was convicted of 19 of the 21 or 22 specified charges, including theft and six counts of espionage.

[9] This was subsequently reduced to 90 years after the military court granted the defense's motion to merge some of the 20 counts that Manning was being charged with on the grounds that they overlapped.

[64] On January 17, 2017, President Obama commuted Manning's sentence to a total of seven years' confinement, starting with the initial date of arrest.

The court rejected Manning's contention that the statute is too vague to provide fair notice of the criminal nature of disclosing classified documents.

Appellant's training and experience indicate, without any doubt, she was on notice and understood the nature of the information she was disclosing and how its disclosure could negatively affect national defense."

The court also rejected Manning's assertion that her actions in disclosing classified information related to national security are protected by the First Amendment.

Manning, the court found, "had no First Amendment right to make the disclosures—doing so not only violated the nondisclosure agreements she signed, but also jeopardized national security.