By Rich Lowry
Friday, December 18, 2020
No one will ever accuse President Donald Trump of being
overly careful in his exercise of his pardon power.
So, it makes sense that advocates of Edward Snowden, the
man responsible for the most damaging classified leak in U.S. history, are
mounting a last-minute push to get the president who pardoned Sheriff Joe and
Roger Stone to issue his most outrageous and indefensible pardon yet.
It’s a transpartisan alliance. Glenn Greenwald, Snowden’s
journalistic partner and foremost advocate, has, of course, been banging the
drum. Rose McGowan has urged Trump on Twitter to be “punk as f***” and pardon
Snowden in defiance of “DC Cult Leaders aka politicians” who “hate truth.”
Renegade Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard is on board, as are
libertarian Trump loyalists Senator Rand Paul and Representative Matt Gaetz.
As Trump’s presidency winds down and his clout on Capitol
Hill diminishes, his sweeping power to grant clemency will be even more
alluring to him, and he said over the summer that he’s considering a Snowden
pardon.
If the pardon can be sold to Trump as a way to stick it
to the deep state on his way out the door, anything is possible. Why go to the
trouble of firing Central Intelligence Agency director Gina Haspel or Federal
Bureau of Investigation director Christopher Wray if he can signal his contempt
for their ilk by bringing in from the cold a bête noire of the U.S.
national-security apparatus with a stroke of his pen?
Working for a National Security Agency contractor,
Snowden stole massive amounts of classified material and began sharing it with
journalists in 2013. When the Justice Department filed criminal charges, he
fled to Russia, which kindly provided him asylum and recently permanent
residency.
Snowden is a self-styled whistleblower. He says he was
motivated by his constitutional qualms about an NSA bulk-data-collection
program and his disgust with official deceptions about the program.
None of this holds up. If Snowden wanted to be a genuine
whistleblower, he could have pursued concerns about the NSA program through
lawful avenues instead of fleeing the country and purloining so many documents
that authorities still can’t be sure how much he stole.
The Snowden disclosures were much more wide-ranging than
the NSA program, in fact so wide-ranging that it’s almost impossible to keep
track. As Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith has asked, why did Snowden’s
devotion to the Constitution require him to disclose details of how we spy on
other countries, how we cooperate with Sweden and Norway to spy on Russia, or
an NSA program called MasterMind to respond to cyberattacks?
None of these programs or actions raise any
constitutional issues whatsoever. Exposing them makes sense only as sheer
nihilism — i.e., Snowden was in a position to steal the information, so why not
take it and disclose it? — or as a calculated act of hostility to U.S.
national-security policy as such.
Snowden’s defenders say not to worry, that Snowden and
the journalists reporting on his documents have been careful not to disclose
anything needlessly damaging to the U.S. and its allies. But there is no reason
that the responsibility for protecting sensitive information involving no
crimes or government misconduct should, via Snowden’s theft, have been
transferred from U.S. officials to assorted reporters and editors.
It’s also naive to believe that Snowden was allowed to
make a home in Vladimir Putin’s Russia without the government exploiting his
trove of secrets.
The president’s pardon power is plenary, but that doesn’t
mean it should be wielded with no standards whatsoever. Traditionally, the
Justice Department looks for contrition when reviewing possible exercises of
clemency.
Not only does Snowden exhibit none, we don’t even know
the full scope of his offense, and he remains a fugitive through the good
offices of an enemy of the United States.
Surely, Trump will be bombarded with bad ideas in the final days of his presidency, but pardoning Edward Snowden has to rank among the worst.
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