TOPLINE
President Donald Trump said Saturday he will take a strong look at pardoning NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, representing a sharp turnaround from the president who once called him a “traitor.”
Freedom of the Press Foundation President Edward Snowden speaks live from Russia during the annual ... [+]
KEY FACTS
“I’m going to take a look at that very strongly,” Trump said during a press briefing Saturday.
Trump said the issue split his staff: “Many people think he should be somehow treated differently, and other people think he did very bad things.”
The president’s willingness to even consider a pardon leagues away from his hardline stance on the issue in 2013 before he was president, when he tweeted Snowden was a “traitor” and a “spy who should be executed.”
Snowden himself weighed in, saying, “the last time we heard a White House considering a pardon was 2016, when the very same Attorney General who once charged me conceded that, on balance, my work in exposing the NSA's unconstitutional system of mass surveillance had been ‘a public service.’”
Crucial quote
“There are a lot of people that think that he is not being treated fairly. I mean, I hear that,” Trump said in an interview with the New York Post on Thursday.
Key background
Snowden is living in Russia, which granted him asylum, after he leaked documents in 2013 detailing U.S. government surveillance programs run by the NSA. The subsequent reporting based on Snowden’s leaks earned the Washington Post and the Guardian the Pulitzer Prize. Snowden is now an advocate for privacy and maintains that the U.S. government has failed to show evidence that the information he leaked has caused harm.
