Whistleblower Chelsea Manning will be freed in May as outgoing United States President Barack Obama has commuted a majority of her prison sentence, The Guardian reported on Wednesday. Manning, a former US Army soldier, has been in jail for the past six years for leaking more than 750,000 pages of state documents to WikiLeaks.

A White House official said that Obama had ordered the commutation despite calling Manning’s crimes “serious” and “harmful to national security”. Human rights groups also welcomed the move, with Amnesty International USA Executive Director Margaret Huang calling it “long overdue”. “It is unconscionable that she languished in prison for years while those allegedly implicated by the information she revealed still haven’t been brought to justice,” she said.

The decision was condemned by Republican Party leaders. US Senator John McCain called it “a sad, yet fitting commentary on President Obama’s failed national security policies”. US Congress Speaker Paul Ryan said Obama had set a “dangerous precedent” by freeing a person convicted of compromising the country’s national security.

Meanwhile, a former intelligence official said the move was “deeply hypocritical given Obama’s denunciation of WikiLeaks’ role in the hacking” of the servers of the Democratic Party’s National Committee, CNN reported.

The move has now raised questions on whether a similar pardon will be issued to former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who is currently living in exile in Russia. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said there were differences between the two cases as Manning went through the judicial process before being found guilty of leaking the documents. “Mr Snowden fled into the arms of an adversary and has sought refuge in a country that most recently made a concerted effort to undermine confidence in our democracy,” Earnest said.