As President, Gary Johnson Would Consider Pardoning Edward Snowden
'I don't want to see him in prison.'
Earlier in the week, former Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledged that Edward Snowden had performed a "public service" by revealing to Americans that their private phone records were being gathered and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA). He nevertheless thinks Snowden should face a trial.
Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson has other ideas. He told Newsmax TV he would consider pardoning Snowden, who faces espionage charges for his information leaks:
"This is someone who has divulged information that we would not know about currently — and that's the United States government spying on all of us as U.S. citizens," Johnson, 63, the former Republican governor of New Mexico, told "The Hard Line" host John Bachman. "I don't want to see him in prison."
Let's remind everybody of the positions of our so-much-more-serious major party candidates. Donald Trump has called Snowden a traitor, a word used by many other Republicans as well, so it's not a case of Trump being Trump.
Hillary Clinton is hardly better. She thinks Snowden should stand trial and has attempted to claim that Snowden could have availed himself of whistleblower protections rather than run away and released the information on his own. The problem with her argument is that it's simply not true.
Watch the Johnson clip here. And watch Nick Gillespie's recent interview of Snowden below:
