Trump Can Take Revenge on the 'Deep State': Pardon Snowden

Twelve years after facilitating the largest national security leak in American history, Edward Snowden remains exiled in Russia, unable to set foot on U.S. soil without losing his freedom.

A bipartisan consensus denouncing Snowden as a criminal traitor quickly formed in Washington, D.C., following the revelation of his identity in 2013: "I don't think Mr. Snowden was a patriot," President Barack Obama said at a press conference. Hillary Clinton dismissed him as "a lawbreaker," House Speaker John Boehner called him a "traitor," Rep. Mike Pompeo (R–Kan.)—later CIA director—called for his execution.

The U.S. government was illegally surveilling its own citizens, and because of decisions made by Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, America was on track to become an Orwellian police state.

This hasn't happened yet thanks in large part to Edward Snowden, who deserves not only a presidential pardon, but a hero's welcome home.

In 2013, Donald Trump shared the D.C. establishment view of Snowden, calling him a "spy who should be executed." In 2015, while campaigning for president, Trump said, "I think he's a total traitor, and I would deal with him harshly." By the end of his first term, however, Trump had changed his mind.

"Many people think [Snowden] should somehow be treated differently, and other people think he did very bad things, and I'm going to take a very good look at it," Trump told a reporter who asked him about a potential Snowden pardon in August 2020.

After Trump lost reelection to Joe Biden, journalist Glenn Greenwald says he "engaged in a huge amount of effort" with Trump's transition team about pardoning Snowden, and that, at one point, Trump was convinced to go through with it.

"I think he liked the idea, the kind of flair of it, and wanted to do it," says Greenwald.

Greenwald says anti-Snowden partisans like Pompeo talked Trump out of it, and that Trump may have worried that such a move would spur congressional Republicans to vote to convict him in his impeachment proceedings.

But now, Trump has less to lose by angering the GOP establishment than he did in 2021.

Pompeo is no longer in his orbit. Trump has already shown a zeal for using the pardon power to settle scores, for better or worse, starting with a blanket pardon of the January 6 rioters. He also kept his promise to the Libertarian Party by freeing the founder of the dark web drug market the Silk Road.

By pardoning Snowden, Trump could really give the finger to the D.C. establishment and, incidentally, do the right thing by sending a message to the world in this moment of creeping global surveillance and censorship: Snowden was right.

"Does the NSA [National Security Agency] collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of  Americans?" asked Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in March 2013.

"Not wittingly," Clapper responded.

Snowden, in his book Permanent Record, says "that was a witting, bald-faced lie" and describes the exchange as his "breaking point"—the moment he realized he'd be morally compromised if he didn't risk everything to expose the truth. Less than three months later, he would hand thousands of classified government documents to Greenwald, documentarian Laura Poitras, and Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill in a Hong Kong hotel room and reveal his identity to the world.

"There's no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions," Snowden told a German reporter in 2014. "Seeing that, for me, really meant for me there was no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this."

Obama urged Snowden to return to the U.S. and face trial.

"If, in fact, he believes that what he did was right, then, like every American citizen, he can come here, appear before the court with a lawyer, and make his case," Obama told the press two months after the publication of the documents Snowden leaked.

But a fair trial was unlikely. Snowden was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, which was passed during World War I and used to quash antiwar activism, landing socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs in prison for advocating draft resistance. Under the Espionage Act, the Rosenbergs got the electric chair for selling nuclear secrets to the Soviets.

The law wasn't designed to prosecute whistleblowers exposing government malfeasance, so a judge wouldn't have allowed Snowden to present his rationale for leaking classified information. In 1973, a federal court prohibited Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed official lies about the Vietnam War, from using a whistleblower defense.

"I wasn't able to say anything about [my motivations] or why I felt that it was reasonable for me to risk my life to get the truth to the American people," Ellsberg told CNN in 2014. "Snowden wouldn't have a chance to say any of those things."

If Snowden had turned himself in, as Obama advised, he would have faced a show trial.

Just look at what happened to Army private and Wikileaks source Bradley Manning—he spent nine months in solitary confinement before standing trial. Manning, who would later identify as Chelsea, ended up serving years in prison before Obama commuted the 35-year sentence.

"The United States will always be my home," maintained Snowden in a 2019 MSNBC interview. "I'll always be willing to come back on a single condition…that the government guarantee that I have the right, and every whistleblower has the right, to tell the jury why they did what they did."

If Snowden had come back without that guarantee, would he have gotten the electric chair like the Rosenbergs? That seems to be what Trump's former CIA chief wanted.

There's no direct evidence that Snowden handed material to foreign powers nor that any intelligence agents were harmed by the published material, which Snowden filtered through journalists like Greenwald and Poitras.

Investigative journalist Edward Epstein wrote a book in 2017 impugning Snowden, pointing to data Snowden took from the NSA that had nothing to do with illegal surveillance. He implies that Snowden was no hero, just a disgruntled employee who carelessly jeopardized American security.

"He was in the palm of Russian intelligence service's hands. When they have someone in their palm, they're going to squeeze them," said Epstein in one interview about the book. 

But Epstein's case has major holes. He alleged that Snowden likely intended all along to trade classified documents to Russian President Vladimir Putin's intelligence forces in exchange for asylum. But Snowden has convincingly argued that ending up in Russia was never his intention and that the U.S. government trapped him there by revoking his passport. He was actually seeking refuge in Ecuador, and he had to leave Hong Kong because the local authorities threatened him with arrest.

"We were traveling to Quito, Ecuador, via Moscow via Havana via Caracas for a simple reason: it was the only safe route available," writes Snowden in Permanent Record. "There were no direct flights to Quito from Hong Kong, and all of the other connecting flights traveled through US airspace."

He became a Russian citizen in 2022, nine years after he was marooned in Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, but he hasn't excused Putin's behavior.

"I think everyone would agree, probably including the Russian President himself, that he is an authoritarian leader. I think the Russian government broadly does not have a good record on human rights, and that hasn't changed," Snowden told MSNBC in 2019.

So why does the D.C. establishment hate Snowden? Because he exposed their lies and undermined their power.

Snowden proved that Clapper lied in his Senate testimony, and Obama and his inner circle knew about it. The documents he leaked revealed numerous illegal intrusions on the private communications of millions of Americans, though Clapper's former head counsel at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence claimed that "every member of the [Senate] committee was already aware of the program" when Wyden grilled Clapper about it. 

It wasn't just cell phone records: Snowden also revealed the existence of the secret electronic surveillance program known as PRISM, whereby the NSA forced companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple to turn over their users' personal information with secret court orders.

He revealed how British and American intelligence collaborated to tap fiber optic cables and break encryption for Google and Yahoo customers without the companies' knowledge.

Another program called XKeyscore created "digital fingerprints" that allowed spies to ID users based on their search patterns and track them even if they changed usernames or computers. This private data would be stored at a $1.5 billion NSA facility in Utah.

Collecting a haystack in search of a needle violates the Fourth Amendment's protection against unlawful search and seizure. But that was the strategy. It was a "collect the whole haystack" approach, as one insider told The Washington Post.

The NSA was building the architecture to permanently store the communications of everyone on the internet, without the knowledge or consent of the American people.

In Snowden's words, his job was to help the NSA create a "permanent record" of all of us, with his role of "managing and connecting the flow of intelligence" giving way "to a job figuring out how to store it forever, which in turn gave way to a job making sure it was universally available and searchable…engineering a system that would keep a permanent record of everyone's life was a tragic mistake."

Establishing such a permanent digital record might make catching criminals more convenient, but to Snowden it also meant violating the privacy of every American and empowering the sort of authoritarian techno-surveillance state that's emerged in China.

"We see how these same technologies are being applied to create what they call the social credit system [in China]," Snowden said in 2019. "If any of your activities online, if your purchases, if your associations, if your friends are in any way different from what the government or the powers-that-be of the moment would like them to be, you're no longer able to purchase train tickets. You're no longer able to board an airplane. You may not be able to get a passport. You may not be eligible for a job."

After the Snowden revelations, a federal judge ruled against the intelligence agencies, writing that bulk collection of Americans' phone records "exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized" and that the "sheer volume of information" collected by the NSA was "staggering."

Another court considering the surveillance of a conservative activist named Larry Klayman determined it likely that "the NSA's bulk collection program is indeed an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment."

That would never have happened if not for Snowden's actions, which also inspired Congressional reform and, most importantly, brought public awareness, which had all sorts of direct and indirect effects—an outcome New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen termed "The Snowden Effect."

Thanks to the Snowden revelations, Apple branded itself around privacy. Messaging apps that use end-to-end encryption like Signal and WhatsApp flourished, and major platforms like Facebook incorporated strong encryption into their private messaging. The public now understands the power of secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts to authorize all sorts of spying without any oversight.

But Obama claimed at the time that he had already "called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations before Mr. Snowden made these leaks." So should Snowden have just sat on the material and waited for Obama to push forward these reforms? Maybe filed an internal complaint?

He says he tried and got nowhere.

Ellsberg was also criticized for not using "official channels" even though he tried to alert Congress that the official narrative about Vietnam was a lie. Henry Kissinger later called Ellsberg "the most dangerous man in America." He was wiretapped by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and the president's henchmen even broke into his psychiatrist's office to try to dig up dirt. When Obama's Secretary of State John Kerry criticized Snowden, he drew a contrast with Ellsberg's patriotism.

"There are many a patriot. You can go back to Daniel Ellsberg and with the Pentagon Papers, and others, who went to court and made their case. Edward Snowden is a coward," Kerry said. 

Ellsberg called Kerry's comments despicable.

"He called Snowden a fugitive from justice. He's a fugitive from injustice," Ellsberg told CNN. "I was not allowed, because of the Espionage Act, to describe my motives, my reasons, the considerations that had led me to break my promise that I'd made to the government many times not to reveal their secrets. That I had regarded those secrets as wrongful, as unconstitutional….Snowden wouldn't have the chance to say any of those things [either]."

But John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama—like Kissinger, Hoover, and Nixon before them—nevertheless pushed the claim that the government's illegal actions and lies could have been addressed by complaining through the official channels.

"My preference," said Obama, "would have been for a lawful, orderly examination of these laws, a thoughtful, fact-based debate that would then lead us to a better place."

But that debate would never have happened if Snowden hadn't forced Obama and the intelligence agencies to admit what they were doing.

So why should Trump pardon Snowden? He has first-hand experience with the kind of unaccountable surveillance Snowden exposed.

The same secretive FISA court that rubber-stamped the NSA's mass surveillance authorized spying on former Trump adviser Carter Page based on faulty information supplied by the FBI.

"Unelected deep state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself," Trump said in a 2017 speech.

It was Snowden who alerted a generation of Americans to this danger. To do so, he gave up a comfortable life earning a six-figure salary, living in Hawaii with his girlfriend.

"You can go to work. You can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest and go to sleep at night after watching your shows," Snowden told Poitras, explaining his decision to hand the material to journalists and go public with his identity. "But if you realize that that's the world that you helped create, and it's going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk and it doesn't matter what the outcome is so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied."

The danger Snowden exposed is more present than ever as the government seeks to spend half a billion dollars integrating artificial intelligence into key federal agencies and tapping the data analytics firm Palantir to scour a centralized federal database Trump created by executive order.

But because Snowden made the public aware of these dangers more than a decade ago, our culture and technology have had time to adapt and figure out ways to protect privacy and evade unwanted surveillance.

We owe Snowden an enormous debt, and Trump should let him come home.

• Editor: John Osterhoudt
• Graphics: Lex Villena