Chelsea Manning thanked President Barack Obama for "giving me a chance" in a tweet Thursday.
"Thank you @BarackObama for giving me a chance. =,)," Manning wrote on Twitter.
Manning's thank you comes a day after Obama firmly defended his decision to cut nearly three decades off Manning's prison term, arguing in his final White House news conference that the former Army intelligence analyst had served a "tough prison sentence" already.
Manning — then known as Bradley — was arrested in 2010 after stealing more than 700,000 military files and diplomatic cables and giving them to Wikileaks.
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.
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"I feel very comfortable that justice has been served," Obama said.
