Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he is considering a request from Australia to drop the decade-long US push to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing a trove of American classified documents.
Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he is considering a request from Australia to drop the decade-long US push to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing a trove of American classified documents.
I have a slight worry that pardoning Snowden would result in his disappearance/death since Putin would no longer have any use for him. Right now they are protecting someone who is considered an enemy of the US government and has embarrassed the US intelligence apparatus, if that changes then he no longer fills a purpose for the Russian government.
I want Snowden to be home free but right now I think he’s in a precarious situation.
If the options are “pardon” and “not pardon”, “not pardon” just means he stays in that exact same precarious situation. At least a pardon stands to change it, with the added benefit of being morally correct.
Even if the change is that he gets sent to a Siberian prison and/or executed? As long as the war in Ukraine is ongoing, I sincerely doubt he has any chance of getting out of Russia.
He’s not doing much inside Russia one way or another. At least a pardon gives him a way out. And if he gets sent to a gulag, that’s not on whoever pardoned him. That’s on whoever sent him to the gulag.
But he’d still be in a gulag, I think that part is more important than a clean conscience.