US attorney general ‘vehemently opposed’ to pardoning Edward Snowden after Donald Trump vows to 'look at' whistleblower's case

Donald Trump's vow to weigh potential pardon for former National Security Agency contractor draws sharp response from attorney general William Barr
Mr Snowden, 37, is currently residing in Russia to avoid prosecution
Reuters
David Child21 August 2020

US attorney general William Barr has said he would be “vehemently opposed” to any attempt to pardon Edward Snowden after President Donald Trump said he would "look at" the whistleblower's case.

Mr Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, was charged under the Espionage Act in 2013 with disclosing details of highly classified government surveillance programmes.

The US Justice Department’s 2013 criminal complaint against him was dated just days after the 37-year-old's name first surfaced as the person who had leaked to the news media that the NSA, in classified surveillance programmes, gathered telephone and internet records to ferret out potential terror plots.

Mr Snowden’s revelations caused a major domestic and international scandal and triggered intense debate over government eavesdropping. His whistleblowing was welcomed by civil liberties advocates, but infuriated senior intelligence officials, who have argued his disclosures caused extraordinary damage and will have repercussions for years to come.

Mr Snowden, for his part, is currently residing in Russia to avoid prosecution, even as the federal charges against him are pending.

Commenting on his case on Saturday, Mr Trump said he would look into issuing a pardon.

"There are many, many people – it seems to be a split decision that many people think that he should be somehow treated differently, and other people think he did very bad things," Mr Trump said at a news conference.

“And I’m going to take a very good look at it.”

Mr Trump’s distrust of his own intelligence community has been a staple of his tenure, particularly because of its conclusion that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election on his behalf, and he has at times bemoaned the broad surveillance powers that the intelligence agencies have at their disposal.

But it was unclear how serious the US president was regarding Mr Snowden's case, particularly given that years earlier he had denounced the latter as a spy deserving of execution.

Mr Barr was however unequivocal in his own assessment of Mr Snowden's case, labelling the latter a "traitor".

"The information he provided our adversaries greatly hurt the safety of the American people,” Mr Barr said.

“He was peddling it around like a commercial merchant. We can’t tolerate that.”

In a memoir published last year, Mr Snowden wrote that his seven years working for the NSA and CIA led him to conclude that the US intelligence community had “hacked the constitution” and put everyone’s liberty at risk and that he had no choice but to turn to journalists to reveal it to the world.

“I realised that I was crazy to have imagined that the Supreme Court, or Congress, or President Obama, seeking to distance his administration from President George W Bush’s, would ever hold the IC legally responsible – for anything,” he wrote, using an abbreviation for the intelligence community.

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