Chelsea Manning could be placed in solitary confinement at a military prison for possessing a copy of the Vanity Fair issue with Caitlyn Jenner on the cover and a novel on transgender issues, in addition to other offenses.
According to the Associated Press, the lawyer for Manning, who was convicted of espionage in 2013 for leaking classified U.S. information to WikiLeaks, confirmed that the former intelligence analyst née Bradley Manning allegedly violated prison rules by possessing various reading materials and an expired tube of toothpaste, sweeping food onto the floor and behaving disrespectfully.
Manning, who admitted to identifying as a woman in 2013, is currently serving a 35-year sentence at the all-male prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Attorney Nancy Hollander said that a closed hearing will be held on August 18 at the prison regarding the offenses, though Manning has requested it be made public.
The highest penalty for the prisoner’s violations is solitary confinement. Hollander likened the charges to "harassment."
"It is not uncommon in prisons to have charges that to the rest of us seem to be absurd," Hollander explained. "Prisons are very controlled environments and they try to keep them very controlled and sometimes in that control they really go too far and I think that this is going too far."
The attorney specifically took issue with Manning’s loss of reading materials, which included the famed Vanity Fair issue and a novel on the topic of transgender issues.
"There is certainly no security risk, and that could impinge on her free speech rights and attempt to silence her," Hollander asserted.
Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce, underwent a public gender transition this year. The former Olympic athlete came out to Diane Sawyer as a transgender woman in an interview in April, during which Jenner also identified as a Republican.
Manning, who an Army court ruled the military must identify as a woman earlier this year, leaked more than 700,000 classified documents--including war logs, diplomatic cables and video from the battlefield--while working in Iraq in 2010.