Traitor, Fraud, Sneak Thief, Spy: Trump Reviewing Idea Of Pardoning Edward Snowden

President Trump told the New York Post that he was considering pardoning the NSA leaker and traitor Edward Snowden.

I trust his national security advisors will convince him to not do so.

In October of last year, I published a piece on Snowden in the Washington Times.

NSA leaker Edward Snowden has published a memoir called “Permanent Record.”

I’ve not read his book and I probably won’t.

I recall the late conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer on Fox News criticizing Mr. Snowden’s video appearance live from Russia to a conference in America in 2014. He was offended particularly by Mr. Snowden’s several references to the U.S. Constitution.

“I don’t want to be lectured by a traitor who speaks from a land that doesn’t have a constitution,” Krauthammer said. 

Like Krauthammer, I don’t want to be lectured by Mr. Snowden and I don’t think I would glean any insights from a self-aggrandizing book by this liar, fraud, sneak thief and traitor.

The former CIA employee and NSA contractor stole and subsequently released to journalists in 2013 more than 1.5 million classified documents. The broad and largely unfiltered intel dump endangered American lives worldwide, and he no doubt gave much more damaging material to his hosts and protectors, the Chinese and the Russians.

Rather than reading Mr. Snowden’s suspect memoir, I reread the 2016 House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan and unclassified report, “Review of the Unauthorized Disclosures of Former National Security Agency Contractor Edward Snowden..”

According to the report’s executive summary, Edward Snowden perpetrated the largest and most damaging public release of classified information in U.S. intelligence history. In August 2014, the chairman and ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence directed committee staff to carry out a comprehensive review of the unauthorized disclosures.

The two-year extensive review offered a number of unclassified findings. According to the report, “these findings demonstrate that the public narrative popularized by Snowden and his allies is rife with falsehoods, exaggerations, and crucial omissions, a pattern that began before he stole 1.5 million sensitive documents.

“Snowden caused tremendous damage to national security, and the vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests — they instead pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries,” the report stated.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/8/edward-snowdens-true-permanent-record/ 

Snowden In Russia: Five Years After Whistleblower Edward Snowden Fled The US For Moscow, There's Growing Evidence The Russians Are Getting Fed Up With Him Too

Richard Pendele at the Daily Mail offers a look at traitor and leaker Edward Snowden in Russia five years after his leaking NSA secrets and compared his life there with George Blake, a British spy who defected to Russia.

Last year, on the eve of his 95th birthday, Blake paid tribute to the SVR, the foreign intelligence service successor to the Communist-era KGB. ‘I believe that you will serve our common cause selflessly and courageously,’ he declared in a statement delivered via the state-approved media.

Compare and contrast Blake with former American National Security Agency contractor and CIA operative Edward Snowden, who betrayed American and British intelligence on an industrial scale.

Snowden, of course, would never describe himself as a Russian spy. Nor would his many millions of adoring liberal supporters. Rather than the ‘traitor’ the U.S. authorities have declared him to be, Snowden is a ‘hero’ or a ‘whistleblower’.

He claims his actions were not a betrayal of his country but a public service; a light shone on the massive surveillance capabilities and abuses of the American and British secret states.

This month saw the fifth anniversary of Snowden’s escape from his Hawaii home to Moscow via Hong Kong, having committed the largest leak of top-secret intelligence data in history. The scale and impact was astounding, and the reverberations continue to this day.

In co-operation with The Guardian and Washington Post newspapers, Snowden revealed that almost every telephone company in America had been providing the National Security Agency (NSA) with their customers’ phone records.

Documents leaked by Snowden also uncovered the existence of a surveillance programme under which the NSA used clandestine court orders to access personal data via tech giants such as Google and Facebook.

           

There have been no TV interviews, not even with Russia’s English language propaganda organ RT to mark the latest landmark

… Their fury was only sharpened by Snowden finding sanctuary with one of those hostile powers; a resurgent old foe which happened to be among the most dictatorial and surveillance-heavy states on the planet.

So what has happened to Mr Snowden? One thing’s for sure: the TV cameras focusing on the World Cup are unlikely to spot him. Since he first came to Russia, Snowden’s profile has become even more secretive, to the extent he is almost invisible.

Young Russians are as eager as their Western counterparts to post pictures of celebrities they have spotted in the street on social media. It never happens to Snowden.

His appearances over the internet using the Skype video system — so often beamed to foreign-held conferences on subjects close to his heart — have dried up. He is tweeting less frequently.

… When he gave a fifth anniversary interview this month to his old collaborators at The Guardian — in which he claimed to have ‘no regrets’ — it was conducted by telephone, rather than face to face. (His first anniversary interview with the same paper took place in person in a Moscow hotel room.)

There have been no TV interviews, not even with Russia’s English language propaganda organ RT to mark the latest landmark.

Indeed, all the signs are that his relationship with his hosts has begun to sour.

… So does Putin’s pet spy, who will celebrate his 35th birthday today, feel like the walls are closing in on him?

Shortly after Snowden fled America, a former CIA chief predicted that he would also end his days there ‘isolated, bored, lonely, depressed...and alcoholic’.

Snowden does not drink and seems devoted to girlfriend Lindsay. She has joined him in Russia having been unaware at the time, he says, of his intention to cause a haemorrhage of Western intelligence. But isolated he certainly is.

… Moscow was only supposed to be a temporary refuge, or so the Snowden camp say. He was holed up in one of the city’s airports for weeks while he sought asylum elsewhere in the world.

But with America desperate to get their hands on him, no one wanted such a diplomatic nightmare. And so he remains trapped. In 2016, Snowden asked to be granted a pardon by the outgoing President Barack Obama. His appeal was rejected.

For all President Donald Trump’s unfathomably close ties to Mr Putin — he has just called for Russia to be readmitted to the G8 group of leading nations — the runaway spy seems just as unlikely to receive clemency from his administration.

Snowden has ridiculed Trump’s intellect, while the President has called him a traitor. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s Secretary of State, has gone further in the past and called for Snowden to receive the death penalty.

Last year, when still head of the CIA, Mr Pompeo spoke contemptuously of ‘the worship of Edward Snowden, and those who steal American secrets for the purpose of self-aggrandisement or money or for whatever their motivation’.

You can read the rest of the piece and view videos and photos via the below link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5867473/Evidence-suggests-Russians-growing-fed-Edward-Snowden.html

You can also read my Washington Times piece on Edward Snowden: Traitor, Thief, Scoundrel, Spy,  via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2017/09/edward-snowden-traitor-thief-scoundrel.html 

Edward Snowden: Traitor, Thief, Scoundrel, Spy

The Washington Times published my piece on NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

My role in the Vietnam War was a minor one. I served as an 18-year-old seaman in the radio communication division aboard the USS Kitty Hawk as the aircraft carrier performed combat operations on “Yankee Station” off the coast of Vietnam in 1970 and 1971.

Radiomen and security administrators performed a variety of functions in the division, including the protection of highly classified material. As the Kitty Hawk served as the Task Force 77 flagship, the communications center processed all information on the Vietnam War, including traffic from the other military services and the alphabet soup intelligence agencies.

In the 1960s and early 1970s the Vietnam War divided the country. It was a strained time in American history, perhaps even more divisive than now. And like many Americans at the time, many of the sailors onboard the carrier were against the U.S. government’s policy in the Vietnam War.

They thought America should win.

Much of the classified material processed in the communications center was considered solid gold. Any sailor in the division could have easily walked off the ship in Hong Kong with a seabag full of classified material and made a gift of them to the press or to the North Vietnamese, the Soviets and the Communist Chinese. But despite strong misgivings about war policy, the sailors took an oath, and they abided by that oath.

Which brings us to Edward Snowden.

The former CIA employee and CIA and NSA contractor famously did not abide by his oath and according to NSA, he stole and subsequently released to certain journalists in 2013 more than 1.5 million classified documents. And he no doubt gave much more damaging material to his hosts and protectors, the Chinese and the Russians.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/10/edward-snowden-must-not-be-made-a-hero/ 

Krauthammer Savages Snowden's SXSW Appearance: "I Don't Want To Be Lectured By A Traitor"

The Daily Caller offers a piece and video clip of Charles Krauthammer on Fox News commenting on NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer blasted Edward Snowden’s digital appearance at the South by Southwest festival, snarling that he doesn’t “want to be lectured by a traitor who speaks from a land that doesn’t have a constitution.”

Krauthammer spoke on a Fox News panel Monday, along with National Journal’s Rob Fournier and The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes. Host Bret Baier asked the panel to respond to Snowden’s remarks at the conference, which were made via video conference from the NSA leaker’s residence in Moscow, Russia.

While Fournier seemed to express tepid support for some of Snowden’s criticisms against the American government, Krauthammer appeared personally offended — particularly by Snowden’s repeated references to the Constitution.

You can watch the video clip via the below link:

http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/10/krauthammer-savages-snowdens-sxsw-appearance-i-dont-want-to-be-lectured-by-a-traitor-video/ 

NSA Leaker Surfaces In Hong Kong

Veteran national security correspondent Bill Gertz at the Washington Beacon reports on the former NSA contractor who leaked information about NSA's surveillance programs.

An intelligence contractor who disclosed a top-secret National Security Agency electronic surveillance program surfaced in Hong Kong on Sunday and suggested he planned to defect to China.

Edward Snowden, a cyber security technical specialist with the intelligence contractor Booz, Allen, Hamilton, appeared in a video posted by the British newspaper the Guardian, which first disclosed the spying program and other top-secret details of U.S. government electronic intelligence and surveillance.

Asked by Guardian correspondent Glenn Greenwald about his presence in Hong Kong and whether he plans to defect to China, Snowden said the assumption that “China is an enemy of the United States” is wrong. “It’s not,” he said. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://freebeacon.com/nsa-leaker-surfaces-in-hong-kong/