Coombs said Manning was young and inexperienced at the time he leaked the documents, and had "pure intentions" when he chose to pass the documents to Wikileaks to "lift the fog of war".
The angle at which he passed the document to the Prime Minister meant some of the names were picked by a studio camera.
Sources close to the case said Anders Kompass passed the document to the French authorities because of the UN's failure to take action to stop the abuse.
Eventually, as readers began passing the document along to friends without permission, ABC decided to post it, free, on its Web site.
The constituent assembly tasked with drafting Egypt's post-revolution constitution has passed the document as the country continues to reel from a decree that gave extraordinary powers to the president, the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi.
Did the possibility that the many people involved in the PAC might have passed the document on to the press not occur to HMRC?.. Taxpayer confidentiality is not the issue here.
Gao, who was detained last May, was accused of passing the document to Ho Pin, head of Mirror Books, Shang said.
Kansas state Rep. Sean Gatewood (D-Topeka), who is up for reelection, originally passed the document sent to Kansas legislators along to The Huffington Post, and North Dakota state Rep. Corey Mock (D-Grand Forks) -- also up for reelection -- passed along the documents sent to his state's legislators in response to a HuffPost query.
The memo, which borrows heavily from the work done by the non-partisan Taxpayers for Common Sense, is being distributed to Democratic and Republican offices alike, according to a high-level Democratic source who passed the document on to The Huffington Post.
