Pardoning Snowden Would Backfire on Trump
The president wants to settle scores with the FBI, but doing so would undermine his attorney general’s reform efforts.
Live from Russia, 2018.
Photographer: Phillip Faraone/Getty Images
Before Donald Trump was president, he often referred to Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who divulged massive secrets to the press about the American surveillance state, as a spy and a traitor. Now Trump is thinking about issuing him a pardon. It is a reckless idea.
Snowden’s initial disclosures were in the public interest. The first stories that appeared in the Guardian and the Washington Post exposed how the U.S. government was collecting and storing all telephone metadata because of a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that authorized the FBI to collect “business records.” In 2015, Congress curtailed much of the government’s collection of bulk phone records as a result of the leak.