Former principal deputy director of national intelligence Sue Gordon doesn’t like Tulsi Gabbard’s push for Edward Snowden to receive a presidential pardon. She told Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation” that the request “reflects a lack of understanding of who we are, and it reflects a lack of respect for what we do.”
Gordon continued, “Unauthorized disclosures of intelligence are always bad. Don’t go with the good or bad, any good outcome or whether he was right or wrong. He had no authority, and he had different paths, and he harmed America.”
“He not only harmed intelligence, he harmed our allies and partners, and he harmed our businesses by what it allowed China to assume about that. There is nothing justifiable about what he’s done. None. And so if they vacate it, what they’re basically saying is all those rules you follow in order to be able to serve America, they don’t matter anymore.”
In 2020, Gabbard and Matt Gaetz cosponsored H. Res. 1162 (IH), a resolution that called for the federal government to drop all charges against Snowden. The push was one that Gabbard also expressed during her own presidential campaign ahead of the 2020 election. She said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” that “If it wasn’t for Snowden, the American people would never have learned the NSA was collecting phone records and spying on Americans.”
“As president, I will protect whistle-blowers who expose threats to our freedom and liberty,” Gabbard added.
In 2013, Snowden was an IT expert working for the National Security Agency when he decided to meet three journalists in Hong Kong and deliver them thousands of top-secret documents about the U.S. government’s surveillance of citizens. While Snowden thought of himself as a whistleblower, the government labeled him a traitor who committed espionage.
Snowden traveled from Hong Kong to Russia, where he planned to depart for Ecuador. The U.S. government canceled his passport while he was in transit. He attempted to gain asylum elsewhere, but ultimately has stayed in Russia ever since.
In 2019, Snowden explained to NPR that the government was “collecting [data] on everyone, everywhere, all of the time, just in case, because you never know what’s going to be interesting … And so what happened was every time we wrote an email, every time you typed something into that Google search box, every time your phone moved, you sent a text message, you made a phone call … the boundaries of the Fourth Amendment were being changed.”
In 2016, Snowden hoped that President Obama would pardon him for the crime before Donald Trump was sworn in as president. “The possibility for a pardon, it seems to every expert who’s looked at this issue, has never been more likely,” he told Katie Couric. “And this is a surprise to myself more than anyone else, I think.”
He also added that he’s never met Russia’s President Putin and “has no intention to.”
You can watch the interview with Sue Gordon in the video above.
