If some of the key picks for President Donald Trump’s cabinet have their way, Edward Snowden might finally get pardoned.
Administrations have been coming and going over the past more than a decade in the US. Still, Snowden, an NSA whistleblower who opened the eyes of Americans – and the rest of the word – to the shocking scale of mass surveillance and personal data collection perpetrated by the agency, is still in exile.
That’s because in his country, instead of being honored like, say, Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, Snowden is still treated as a fugitive from justice.
Snowden has been indicted as a “spy” and is considered to be one by many, even though the revelations from the leaked documents were not handed to another country, but publicly released to benefit the rights of the citizens of his own.
This is something that Donald Trump clearly took into consideration when he was “close” to pardoning Snowden near the end of his first stint in office. However, that eventually didn’t happen, but now, a number of figures likely to hold top positions in the new US administration think the time has come.
Among them is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump wants as his Health and Human Services secretary. Another is Donald Trump Jr., who is also in favor of pardoning several other whistleblowers, and a candidate for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has long espoused a similar stance.
The man who originally helped Snowden publish his revelations, lawyer, and journalist Glenn Greenwald, thinks it makes perfect sense for Trump to this time go ahead and pardon Snowden, not least since some of the abuses the whistleblower exposed in 2013 have in the meantime affected the president as well.
“And if Trump’s goal is to bring transparency to those agencies there is no one who has done that more bravely and honestly than Snowden,” said Greenwald, who in 2013 worked with several major newspapers in the US and around the world to bring the Snowden files to the public.
Some of those newspapers – the Washington Post and the Guardian even won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
