Former US President Trump on the Assange and Snowden cases: the court will sort it out on its own
Photo: Sarah Silbiger / Reuters
Former US President Donald Trump explained why he did not issue pardon orders for former US intelligence officer Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He spoke about this in an interview with the Daily Wire.
According to the former head of the White House, he was in a dilemma. “On the one – it’s like a spy story is happening, and on the other – someone who exposed the real crimes,” he said, adding that he decided to give the court the opportunity to figure it out on its own.
At the same time, Trump agreed that some of the “bad things” revealed by Assange and Snowden damaged the US reputation and threw the country back.
Snowden found himself at the center of an international scandal in 2013, having handed over secret documents related to a program of American intelligence services to spy on US citizens and residents of other countries to the journalists of The Guardian and The Washington Post. After that, he fled the United States and at the same time asked for political asylum from several dozen countries, including Russia, where he eventually received a residence permit. In the United States, he is charged with the illegal transfer of information of great importance to national security, the deliberate transfer of intelligence information and theft of state property, he faces up to 30 years in prison.
In October 2016, shortly before the US presidential elections, the WikiLeaks website published the correspondence of John Podesta, the chairman of the campaign of the US presidential candidate from the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton. The letters addressed issues of nuclear energy, as well as donations to the Clinton Foundation from mining. Clinton blamed Russia for disseminating this information and failing in the elections. The U.S. Department of Justice filed 17 charges against Assange in May 2019, later adding another. If extradited to the United States, the founder of WikiLeaks faces up to 175 years in prison. In 2020, Trump promised to pardon Assange if he named the source from whom he received the texts of the letters from the hacked servers.
