President Trump says he’s “very strongly” looking at pardoning CIA tattler Eric Snowden.
His remarks suggest he’s made a decision and a pardon for the whistleblower is coming. Trump made the statements at one of his golf courses on Saturday, Aug. 15, 2020. Earlier in the week he told the tabloid newspaper New York Post that he’d heard Snowden was being “persecuted.”
In 2013 Snowden, a former CIA contractor (not employee), leaked highly classified documents to journalists, not a foreign government, which mostly dealt with global surveillance systems. He’s said his motives were disillusionment and being ignored when he tried to express his ethical concerns through official channels.
President Obama’s Justice Department promptly charged him with espionage. By then, he’d left the country. Trump has an antagonistic relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies.
Snowden initially fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, where he’s living in asylum. He wants to return to the U.S. and said he’s willing to do so if “guaranteed a fair trial” allowing him to present what a “public interest” defense, i.e., he shouldn’t be convicted because he made the disclosures in the public interest and didn’t profit from them.
Judges determine what defenses can be argued to a jury, based on applicable law. Snowden was charged under a statute that his lawyer says would hinder him “from defending himself before a jury in open court.” Read stories here and here, and the Wikipedia article about Snowden here.
Photo: Eric Snowden and wife Lindsay Mills, American dancer and acrobat