Chelsea Manning says her commutation was nothing like Joe Arpaio’s pardon, thanks – Mashable

Not the same as the convicted sheriff.

Image: Tim Travers Hawkins/COURTESY OF CHELSEA MANNING HANDOUT/EPA/REX/Shutterstock

On Friday night, in the middle of a hurricane, President Donald Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff who profiled Latinos and ignored a court order to stop.

It's nothing like what happened to Chelsea Manning, who spent seven years in prison for leaking classified documents and had the rest of her 35-year sentence commuted by President Obama in January.

Some people, however, were evidently using Obama's decision to commute Manning's sentence to justify Trump's decision to pardon Arpaio, who hasn't served any jail time for his conviction of criminal contempt or expressed any remorse for his history of racial profiling.

Manning quickly shut them down.

"Why does everyone insist on comparing my commutation with the pardon of some crooked cop?" she tweeted Friday night, shortly after Trump pardoned Arpaio.

Trump hinted that he might pardon Arpaio during his rally in Phoenix on Tuesday. In a tweet Friday night, the president called the sheriff an "American patriot."

Along with profiling Latinos, Arpaio was known for harsh, violent conditions in the jails he oversaw for over 20 years. He was also the sheriff who, you might remember, sent a member of his staff to Hawaii to look for Obama's birth certificate.

So it's not surprising Manning would immediately criticize those who compared his case with herswhere both the situation of the pardon and commutation were wildly different, as were reasons why both were convicted.

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Chelsea Manning says her commutation was nothing like Joe Arpaio's pardon, thanks - Mashable