Chelsea Manning Breaks Silence In First Interview Since Being Freed From Prison

Chelsea Manning gave an emotional first interview after being released from prison last month. At one point during the interview, the soldier broke down in tears when asked what she would say to President Obama, who granted her clemency in the final days of his presidency after she spent 7 years in prison.

"I was given a chance, that's all I wanted," Manning told Juju Chang in an exclusive ABC interview. "That's all I asked for was a chance. That's it."

WATCH: ABC NEWS EXCLUSIVE: Chelsea Manning speaks out for the first time since her release from prison, sitting down with @jujuchangABC. pic.twitter.com/DkoSZOP1Oj

— Good Morning America (@GMA) June 9, 2017

Manning, 29, was arrested in May 2010 after leaking classified information to Wikileaks. The classified material included videos of a 2007 airstrike in Baghdad and a 2009 airstrike in Afghanistan.

Additionally, she leaked hundreds of thousands of Army reports known as "Iraq War Logs" and the "Afghan War Diary." The leaked information was released through Wikileaks from April to Nov. 2010.

READ: Glenn Greenwald On Chelsea Manning, Donald Trump And How Journalists Should Handle 'Illegal' Leaks

When discussing her decision to leak the information Manning was defiant but took responsibility.

"I've accepted responsibility," she said in the interview. "No one told me to do this. Nobody directed me to do this. This is me. It's on me."

Manning was convicted by a military tribunal in July 2013 under the Espionage and Computer Fraud and Abuse Acts and sentenced to 35 years in prison for releasing over 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks, the longest sentence the U.S. government has ever handed to someone who's leaked classified documents.

Chang noted that many people either consider her a hero or a traitor. When asked if she considered herself a traitor, Manning said, “I have a responsibility to the public. We all have a responsibility to the public.”

READ: PICTURE: Chelsea Manning Instagrams Photo 1 Day After Prison Release

She did not, however, believe that she threatened national security.

“I work with this information every day,” she said. “I’m the subject matter expert for this stuff. You know, we’re the ones who work with it the most. We’re the most familiar with it. It’s not, you know, it’s not a general who writes this stuff.”

In an exclusive International Business Times interview with Glen Greenwald, the journalist who published National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden laid out the reasons that he considers Manning to be a hero for the documents that she leaked.

"What [Manning] revealed was not anything illegal," he told IBT's David Sirota. "It was a whole range of war crimes. Or at least not domestically illegal. They were war crimes. They were deceit of the public. They were complicity with foreign corruption."

Another subject that was broached in the ABC Interview with Manning was her coming out as transgender the day after she was sentenced in 2013, and her fight to receive hormone treatment to treat her diagnosed case of gender dysphoria after the military denied her initial request and she tried to commit suicide in prison twice.

"It's literally what keeps me alive," Manning said of the hormone treatment. "[It] keeps me from feeling like I'm in the wrong body. I used to get these horrible feeling like I just wanted to rip my body apart and I don't want to have to go through that experience again. It's really, really awful."

In 2014 her ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio filed a lawsuit on her behalf and she began getting treatment in 2015.