No Pardons For Edward Snowden Or Julian Assange
According to a CNN report, Trump submitted to Republican national security
hawks and abandoned clemency for the NSA whistleblower and the WikiLeaks
founder
Kevin Gosztola
Jan 20
Although several long shot campaigns were mounted, President Donald Trump
did not pardon any whistleblowers who were indicted or prosecuted under the
United States Espionage Act. He also declined to pardon the only journalist
ever to be indicted under the World War I-era law.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden were
not offered clemency because Trump "did not want to anger Senate Republicans
who will soon determine whether he's convicted during his Senate trial."
"Multiple GOP lawmakers had sent messages through aides that they felt
strongly about not granting clemency to Assange or Snowden," according to
CNN.
NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, who was the first to be prosecuted under
the Espionage Act under Trump, and former CIA officer John Kiriakou pursued
pardons. They were effectively denied as well.
On January 17, the New York Times reported that an associate of Trump lawyer
Rudy Giuliani told Kiriakou a pardon would cost him $2 million.
"I laughed. Two million bucks-are you out of your mind?" Kiriakou told the
Times. "Even if I had two million bucks, I wouldn't spend it to recover a
$700,000 pension."
The report exposed a sliver of the corruption around pardons in the final
days of the Trump presidency, as "several people with connections" to Trump
apparently "accepted large sums of money" in return for clemency.
Kiriakou said Trump was not the only president in history to encourage this
kind of behavior. "Certainly, Bill Clinton did at the end of his
administration well. But this just highlights how the pardon process in the
United States is broken."
Throughout the past three months, prominent supporters of Assange, like
Pamela Anderson and Glenn Greenwald, were frequent guests on Fox News during
primetime in order to communicate the case for a pardon directly to Trump.
A few Republicans in Congress, like Senator Rand Paul and Representative
Matt Gaetz, crafted a partisan pitch for pardoning Snowden that went
something like Democratic allies, such as former director of national
intelligence James Clapper, persecuted him.
"He revealed that James Clapper, the highest-ranking, most powerful spy in
the world, was spying on Americans and lied to us about it," Paul declared.
"So I think what Snowden did was a service to the American people and he
ought to be pardoned."
But Snowden did not have millions of dollars to pay off Trump nor was he
ever going to do Trump any political favors.
Trump constantly bashed the "deep state" during his campaign and presidency,
but when it came down to challenge national security institutions and stand
up to their apparatchiks in the Republican Party, he showed there was
nothing behind it.
"[The rhetoric] ended up not really serving anybody," Kiriakou contended.
Which is not to say the pardon campaigns by Assange, Snowden, Winner,
Kiriakou, and others were a waste of time. Nobody would have predicted
President Barack Obama would commute U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea
Manning's sentence in 2017 during the final days of his administration.
Assange, who was indicted under Trump, will remain in Belmarsh, a
high-security prison in London where COVID-19 has recently spread through
his unit. The Biden Justice Department is expected to pursue an appeal of a
British court's decision to deny the U.S. government's extradition request
against Assange.
With a newborn, Snowden and his wife, Lindsay Mills, will remain in Moscow.
They will live in exile at least until Snowden can return and defend his
whistleblowing acts in a courtroom in the Eastern District of Virginia.
(Significant reform is necessary for that to happen.)
Winner will be able to leave Federal Medical Center Carswell and go to a
halfway house as early as November 2021. However, she also must worry about
COVID-19 outbreaks at Carswell.
Because Kiriakou completed his sentence several years ago, his circumstances
are far less dire. He still would like to reclaim his pension.
In the end, a president who built up a brand of standing up to the so-called
swamp did not want to take any heat for pardoning individuals loathed by the
very establishment that despises him. He was spineless and weak.
Trump risked a scandal over pardons for his son-in-law or any one of his
cronies. He was not willing to take the same risk for Assange, Snowden, or
Kiriakou.
"No president wants to really be involved in a controversy. Donald Trump
[was] no different," Kiriakou concluded.
