President Trump Should Pardon Edward Snowden

(Disclaimer: La Tonique Media LLC does not represent any political ideology. While we do not espouse any political beliefs, we do seek to provide a balance perspective by incorporating voices from both sides of the political spectrum.)

By Matthew Laurence

Seven years ago is when Edward Snowden and the conversation around surveillance on American citizens changed forever. The documents he collected and leaked to newspapers around the globe are one of the most important peeks inside the American government's spying apparatus to date. Since then, both his motives and methods of distribution have been topics of heated debate. Some consider him a traitor, others a hero. With President Trump's term coming to an end, this is usually the time the president starts issuing pardons. There is a renewed push for Edward Snowden to receive a presidential pardon, and President Trump should make the move.

There is primarily one very important reason Trump should pardon Edward Snowden. He turned out right. As reported by Reuters earlier this year on a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit "the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional."  The court also found that leaders of the NSA publicly defending the programs were not telling the truth. Referring most famously to a hearing where former Director of Intelligence James Clapper lied about the program to Congress. A moment that tipped Edward Snowden over the edge to come clean. That court found that Snowden's disclosure of information about the NSA's spying program not only led to a vigorous debate about privacy in the United States but prompted the passing of the FREEDOM Act, which essentially ended that mass collection program.

Advocating to pardon Edward Snowden is a bipartisan issue. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard; Rep. Rand Paul; Rep. Justin Amash; Rep. Matt Gaetz; the ACLU; Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO; various human rights groups and more. You get the point. Americans of all stripes want to see some sort of pardon or clemency for an act of American heroism.

However, the people who call Edward Snowden a traitor typically come from the hawkish wings of both parties and the very intelligence community whose crimes Snowden exposed. People like Susan Rice or Rep. Lindsey Graham have been doing it for ages. They frequently make a judgment on both his motives and methods. Rarely, if ever, do they comment on the nature of the documents or talk about the blatant abuses revealed in them. Instead, someone like Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, yes, that Cheney, said it would be "unconscionable" for Trump to pardon a "traitor" who put our country at risk. In Cheney's mind, Edward Snowden wanted to reveal that Americans were being illegally spied on to get Americans killed or similar unfounded claims. The former head of the CIA, John Brennan, repeated Cheyney's lie that what Snowden really intended was to give state secrets to Moscow and Beijing. As the founder of The Intercept, and first point of contact for Snowden when he began revealing these secrets, Glenn Greenwald points out, this is a lie made up out of thin air. Not only would you have to prove a negative, but this ignores everything Snowden has said about his motives. From day one he has been remarkably consistent about having patriotic intentions. Whether that is in his NPR interviews or Joe Rogan Experience podcast appearances, he is consistent. This is a story of a citizen concerned about Americans having their rights infringed.  

Reflecting on his decision to go public with classified information, Edward Snowden says, "The likeliest outcome for me, hands down, was that I'd spend the rest of my life in an orange jumpsuit, but that was a risk that I had to take." (Photo provided to the public by Edward Snowden)

Two frequently cited but convoluted arguments that Snowden is a traitor are his refusal to stay in the United States and face federal prosecution, and about the channels he decided to go through to publish those secrets. In an argument laid out in The Diplomat at the time, author Zachary Keck summarizes this argument. If Snowden was a "true patriotic whistleblower" he would be willing to "accept the punishment their disclosures bring," that "they'll be confident enough that the American people will ultimately come to appreciate their actions and they'll be pardoned." Well, the situation we are in currently proves that is wrong. Even as U.S. courts admit the program was illegal, the same hawks in both parties are still advocating for his imprisonment. Not to mention the fact that the Obama administration Snowden was up against notoriously prosecuted more whistleblowers than any administration in American history. If you care at all about whistleblowers, and I'm under no impression these people do, that has to be the worst possible system imaginable.

Critics also have a problem with how he chose to disseminate the information. Snowden himself never published a single document. What he did instead was hand the trove of classified information to reporters and journalists at The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian among others. Editorial rooms are the ones who decided what to publish and when. Snowden was never even consulted on these decisions. When detractors say that Snowden published information that puts Americans in danger, a claim that to this day has never been proven, they are discounting this key piece of information. Worse yet, implicit in their claim is that not even journalists have a right to publish damaging information about governments if said government deems it classified. That isn’t to say journalists should publish everything and anything just for the sake of doing so. But these are the people who believe Chelsea Manning should have shut her mouth instead of letting Americans know their military was responsible for covering up the deaths of civilians overseas. Anyone who is serious about keeping power accountable should dismiss these ridiculous assertions. 

These arguments also ignore the timeline and reasoning behind why Snowden is stuck in Russia to begin with. Edward Snowden did not fly to Moscow to start yucking it up with the FSB. While trying to get to Ecuador for asylum, the U.S. State Department under John Kerry revoked his passport. Current President-elect Joe Biden then pushed every country even thinking about granting him asylum to not do so. Which is all the more reason for Trump to issue this pardon immediately.  Snowden revealed in a 2019 interview that he applied for asylum in France before it was eventually quashed. That is when Snowden was forced to apply for asylum in Russia. Where to this day he stays and refuses to cooperate with any intelligence services. 

As time goes on the more we learn that the information Edward Snowden helped reveal to the world was an enormous service to the American people. It is still helping Americans drawback rights taken from them in the infamous PATRIOT Act after Sept.11, 2001. Thankfully, public opinion appears to be shifting and both his level of support and chance of being pardoned is at an all-time high. Since Donald Trump is an ego-driven person, the pardoning of Snowden will also make his worst enemies shriek in disapproval. At this point, if it gets an American hero out of trouble, I'm willing to give him the ego boost.

Matthew is a political writer for La Tonique.