A Former Deputy CIA Director Resigns From His Harvard Fellowship After The Hiring Of Chelsea Manning

On Wednesday, the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School announced its newest visiting fellows for the 2017-18 academic year. The new additions included former Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Chelsea Manning. Mika Brzezinski, Joe Scarborough, Jason Chaffetz, Robby Mook, and Corey Lewandowski (who escaped prosecution on a battery charge while acting as Donald Trump’s campaign manager). The fellows are brought to Harvard for a limited number of events, but that isn’t stopping former CIA deputy director Michael Morell from resigning his own position at Harvard (in a different department) in disgust over the school naming Manning a fellow.

Morell released this resignation letter, which reads in part:

Unfortunately, I cannot be part of an organization — the Kennedy School — that honors a convicted felon and leaker of classified information, Ms. Chelsea Manning, by inviting her to be a Visiting Fellow at the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. Ms. Manning was found guilty of 17 serious crimes, including six counts of espionage, for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks, an entity that CIA Director Mike Pompeo says operates like an adversarial foreign intelligence service.

Morell goes on to note that “senior military leaders” said that Manning put U.S. military service members’ lives at risk, and her conviction was praised at the time. Morell does not acknowledge that Manning served several years of her sentence and that it was commuted.

Morell, again who works in a different department than these fellows, goes on to say he is resigning so that people do not leak classified information in the future. You can read his full letter below.

(Via CBS News)