No Pardon for Snowden

[Valin]

National Review:

He’s not a whistleblower, he’s a criminal.

The Editors

September 16, 2016

 

 

 

Edward Snowden, the former CIA and NSA contractor responsible for the worst leak in the history of American intelligence, is seeking a presidential pardon. “These were necessary things, these were vital things” to disclose, Snowden told the Guardian in an interview published this week. He has behind him the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, and a letter encouraging President Obama to grant the pardon has been signed by a swath of celebrities ranging from George Soros and Noam Chomsky to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and actor Danny Glover. Snowden, a biopic directed by Oliver Stone, opens in theaters this weekend.

 

But the hype and high-profile support do not change the facts. Edward Snowden should not be pardoned; he should be prosecuted.

 

As leak cases go, this is one even Eric Holder’s Justice Department could handle. Snowden has confessed his crime, explained how and why he did it, and admitted that he knowingly endangered national security. The only issue, of course, is whether Snowden qualifies for “whistleblower” protections, and three-and-a-half years later it’s clear that his disclosures about government surveillance practices came at a disastrously high price.

 

People on both sides of the political aisle were alarmed to discover the extent of America’s surveillance-gathering operations, the most controversial of which has been the NSA’s metadata program, and Snowden did reveal isolated instances of abuse and overreach, though no ongoing illegal practices. In an effort to assuage often-overwrought privacy concerns, Congress and the Obama administration have sought to curtail the NSA’s power to collect data in bulk; in May of last year, they (wrongheadedly, in our opinion) permitted Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which governed the metadata program, to expire, and replaced it with the misguided USA Freedom Act.

 

Snowden and his defenders point to these and other policy revisions as an implicit admission that the policies were unconstitutional to start with. But the constitutional basis for the metadata program — the Supreme Court’s 1974 ruling in Smith v. Maryland — is quite clear.

 

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[Valin]

Snowden Is a Traitor and a Fraud, Period
A bipartisan House Intelligence Committee report drives a stake through his disgraceful pardon bid.
Fred Fleitz
September 16, 2016

At a time of extreme partisanship in our country and in the midst of what may be the most contentious presidential election in U.S. history, a congressional committee did something extraordinary: it issued a bipartisan and unanimous report on an extremely divisive issue. This issue is whether former NSA technician Edward Snowden, who stole 1.5 million classified documents and leaked thousands to the news media, is a true whistleblower or a traitor.

 

The report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (where I worked for five years) found what many of us have long argued: Snowden is not a whistleblower; he is a disgruntled former intelligence employee who did enormous damage to U.S. national security. Click here to read the unclassified summary of this report.

 

The House Intelligence Committee report could not be better timed, having come out the day before the opening of Oliver Stone’s hagiographic film Snowden and a new campaign by liberal groups and the news media to convince President Obama to pardon Snowden for the contribution he supposedly made to the cause of protecting civil liberties.

 

The five findings in the committee report’s unclassified summary are stunning.

 

(Snip)