The video suggests “we can do better” than current political leaders.
Former soldier Chelsea Manning has announced her bid to run for a Senate seat in Maryland with the release of her first campaign video on Sunday.
The former soldier and transgender activist who was convicted for sharing classified documents with Wikileaks and served seven years in prison shared the video to YouTube and Twitter.
“Yep, we’re running for Senate,” she tweeted, sharing her well-know catchphrase #wegotthis.
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The video features Manning, whose sentence was commuted by former president Barack Obama in January 2017, stating: “We do not need more or better leaders, we need someone willing to fight.”
“We need to stop asking them to give us our rights. They won’t support us, they won’t compromise. We need to stop expecting that our systems will somehow fix themselves,” Manning’s video said showing videos of protests across the U. S., along with footage of President Donald Trump and the White House.
“We need to actually take the reigns of power from them, we need to challenge them at every level. We need to fix this. We don’t need them anymore, we can do better. You’re damn right we got this,” the video added.
Her decision to run for Senate comes despite her criminal record, which is no barrier to running for Congress in the U. S.
Indeed, the only qualifications to run for U. S. Senate in Maryland are that candidates must be at least 30-years-old, have citizenship in the U. S for at least nine years, and live in the state at the time of the election.
First the first time since her release from prison, Chelsea Manning, a former U. S. Army soldier responsible for a massive leak of classified material, talks about why she did it. Chelsea Manning/CC BY-SA
Manning, whose commuted sentence was criticized by Trump, will be running against Senator Ben Cardin in November’s Democratic primary and is not currently the only person with a criminal record running for a U. S. Senate seat.
Joe Arpaio, the far-right former sheriff from Arizona who was pardoned by President Donald Trump last August, also announced on Tuesday that he is running for U. S. Senate.
