Originally published 2020-08-24.
In August 2020, President Donald Trump said he would consider pardoning Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who exposed the US National Security Agency’s mass-surveillance programmes in 2013. Asked at a news conference at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club on 15 August, Trump said: “I’m going to start looking at it.”
No pardon followed. Trump left office in January 2021 without granting clemency to Snowden, who still faces US charges under the Espionage Act. Snowden, who has lived in Russia since 2013, received permanent residency there in 2020 and Russian citizenship in September 2022.
What Trump said, and why it surprised people
The remarks first surfaced in an interview with the New York Post, in which Trump said that “a lot of people” felt Snowden was not being treated fairly. Two days later, as Reuters reported, he went further at Bedminster, describing public opinion as “a split decision”: some people thought Snowden should be treated differently, others that he had done very bad things.
The shift was striking. Soon after the 2013 leaks, Trump had called Snowden a spy who should be executed, according to The New Daily. A pardon would also have gone against the views of much of the US intelligence community, which regards the leaks as among the most damaging in its history.
Who Edward Snowden is
Born in North Carolina in 1983, Snowden worked for the CIA from 2006 to 2009 and then as a contractor on NSA systems, first through Dell and finally, for a few months in 2013, through Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii. In May 2013 he flew to Hong Kong with a large cache of classified documents and handed them to journalists including Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman and Ewen MacAskill.
The first stories, published by The Guardian on 5 June 2013, revealed that the NSA was collecting the phone records of millions of Americans in bulk. Later reports described programmes such as PRISM, which drew data from major internet companies. Snowden identified himself as the source days later.
The documents also revealed spying on foreign governments and allies, including reports in late 2013 that US intelligence had monitored German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone. Those revelations strained relations with Europe and fed the long argument over whether Snowden was a whistleblower or a leaker who harmed his country.
How he ended up in Russia
US prosecutors charged Snowden in June 2013 with theft of government property and two counts under the Espionage Act of 1917. His passport was revoked while he was travelling, and he landed in Moscow on 23 June 2013, reportedly intending to transit onwards to Latin America. Stranded in the airport for weeks, he was granted temporary asylum in Russia on 1 August 2013 and has lived there since.
Snowden has said he would return to the United States if guaranteed a fair trial. The problem, his lawyers argue, is that the Espionage Act does not allow a defendant to argue that disclosures served the public interest, so he could not present the defence he considers central to his case.
Whistleblower or traitor?
Opinion on Snowden has always split sharply. Supporters credit him with starting a global debate about privacy and prompting real reforms; in 2015 Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which ended the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. In September 2020, weeks after Trump’s remarks, a federal appeals court ruled in United States v. Moalin that the phone-records programme Snowden exposed had been unlawful.
Critics, including many members of Congress and intelligence officials, argue that he went far beyond domestic surveillance, released details of foreign intelligence operations, and endangered sources. His move to Russia has also deepened suspicion among his detractors.
Snowden replied to Trump’s comments by recalling an earlier moment when a pardon was discussed:
The last time we heard a White House considering a pardon was 2016, when the very same Attorney General who once charged me conceded that, on balance, my work in exposing the NSA's unconstitutional system of mass surveillance had been "a public service." https://t.co/fAseViVwAx
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 14, 2020
The “public service” remark he quoted was made in 2016 by former Attorney General Eric Holder, the official who had brought the charges against him.
It was not the first push for clemency. In 2016, civil liberties and human rights groups including the ACLU and Amnesty International ran a public campaign asking President Barack Obama to pardon Snowden before leaving office. Obama did not, saying publicly that he could not pardon someone who had not yet gone before a court.
What a pardon would have meant
Under the US Constitution the president can grant pardons for federal offences, even before a trial or conviction, as Gerald Ford did for Richard Nixon in 1974. A pardon would have wiped out the federal charges and let Snowden return without facing prosecution on them. Trump used the power often in 2020; in July he commuted the 40-month sentence of his former adviser Roger Stone, convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering, and in December he granted Stone a full pardon.
A pardon would not, however, have ended every dispute. In 2019 the US government won a civil case over Snowden’s memoir, Permanent Record, because he had not submitted it for pre-publication review, and he was ordered to hand over more than $5.2 million in book and speaking proceeds.
What happened next
The Snowden pardon never came. In the final weeks of his term Trump pardoned dozens of allies and others, but Snowden was not among them. Russia granted Snowden permanent residency in October 2020 and, on 26 September 2022, Vladimir Putin signed a decree making him a Russian citizen. US officials continue to say he should return to face trial.
Sources: The New Daily, 16 August 2020; Wikipedia: Edward Snowden.
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