Edward Snowden
“Getting pardoned is going to be a very, very big lift for any president,” Gellman told Yahoo News’ “Skullduggery” podcast. “The intelligence community, the national security community, loathes Snowden and have long memories for this sort of thing, and I don’t think he’ll be pardoned in his lifetime.”
“We’re transparent to our government, our government is opaque to us, and that creates distortions in the balance of power,” he said.
Still, Gellman is clear that his book is not meant to be a full-throated defense of Snowden, who remains in Russia, where he has been since shortly after Gellman and other Washington Post reporters first revealed the NSA’s illegal mass data collection efforts thanks to Snowden’s disclosures.
Over the years, Gellman and Snowden have debated the surveillance state and its importance, sometimes ending up on opposite sides of the debate. Gellman said Snowden intrigues him in part because of how far he was willing to go to reveal sensitive and previously unknown NSA practices such as the illegal bulk collection of phone records. Congress outlawed the practice in 2015, a step that almost definitely would not have happened without Snowden’s revelations.
Gellman said that despite speculation by others that Snowden is a Russian spy, he just doesn’t believe it based on his experiences with the whistleblower. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Snowden reached out to Russian diplomats based in Hong Kong during the two weeks he spent there before the story broke, but Gellman said he spent significant time investigating Snowden’s relationship with Russia and has concluded that Snowden is not a Russian asset.
“Snowden has also acknowledged to me, and I thought it was very interesting, that Putin has reason to protect him, because although he is not in fact a Russian agent, he might look that way to other people and Putin does not want to discourage walk-ins by foreign intelligence officers of other countries,” Gellman said. “If he sent Snowden back, that would make people wary … so Snowden says, ‘Even though I am not a spy, he is treating me as though I were so that he doesn’t blow chances with somebody else.’”
Navy Vet