President Barack Obama's commuting of Chelsea Manning's prison sentence for providing classified documents to WikiLeaks "is great news for Donald Trump" conservative journalist Bill Kristol said Tuesday.
"The national security and the intelligence community is upset — in my judgment, rightly so — about some of the things Donald Trump is saying about them," Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, told Jake Tapper on CNN. "Now, they're going to spend the rest of the week being more upset about President Obama."
Obama's decision reduced Manning's 35-year sentence to time served, allowing her to leave prison in May.
Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, was convicted in military court in 2013 of six violations of the Espionage Act and 14 other offenses for leaking more than 700,000 documents and some battlefield video to WikiLeaks.
Formerly known as Bradley, she committed the crimes in 2009 and asked Obama to commute her sentence in November.
"It's hard to under estimate how unpopular this will be with the national security and intelligence community," Kristol told Tapper. "Manning released just thousands, tens of thousands, millions probably of documents.
"They put a pretty big emphasis on national security," he said of the Obama administration. "Yet, there is someone on the front lines figuring out how to get in the system, take all this stuff.
"Not accidentally, purposely downloading it and giving it to WikiLeaks — to make sure it is released."
Other conservatives slammed the president's move on Twitter: