AG Barr ‘Vehemently Opposed’ to Pardoning Edward Snowden After Trump Said He’d ‘Look At’ it
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Attorney General William Barr said Friday he “vehemently opposed” any move by President Donald Trump to pardon former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
“He was a traitor and the information he provided our adversaries greatly hurt the safety of the American people,” Barr said in an interview with the Associated Press. “He was peddling it around like a commercial merchant. We can’t tolerate that.”
Snowden in 2013 leaked thousands of documents exposing the federal government’s practice of collecting surveillance data on Americans in bulk using a panoply of programs. The documents revealed the falsity of assertions made by former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper — among other intelligence officials — that the government did not collect data from innocent Americans.
Trump said last week that he was open to a pardon for Snowden. Speaking in reference to a Department of Justice review of the Obama administration’s reported surveillance of his 2016 campaign, he said, “Snowden is one of the people they talk about. They talk about numerous people, but he is certainly one of the people that they do talk about. I guess the DOJ is looking to extradite him right now? … It’s certainly something I could look at. Many people are on his side, I will say that. I don’t know him, never met him. But many people are on his side.
“There are many, many people — it seems to be a split decision that many people think that he should be somehow treated differently, and other people think he did very bad things,” he added. “And I’m going to take a very good look at it.”
The comments marked a partial reversal from Trump’s position before his election. “Snowden is a spy who should be executed,” Trump wrote on Twitter in 2013. “But if … he could reveal Obama’s records, I might become a major fan.”
Snowden fled to Hong Kong in 2013 prior to leaking the documents and subsequently sought asylum in Russia, where he still resides. He faces multiple federal felony charges under the Espionage Act for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.
