Will Trump’s Second Chance Bring Justice for Edward Snowden?

Todayville

Published

1 month ago

3 minute read

Snowden has been indicted as a “spy” and is considered to be one by many, even though the revelations from the leaked documents were not handed to another country, but publicly released to benefit the rights of the citizens of his own.

If some of the key picks for President Donald Trump’s cabinet have their way, Edward Snowden might finally get pardoned.

Administrations have been coming and going over the past more than a decade in the US. Still, Snowden, an NSA whistleblower who opened the eyes of Americans – and the rest of the word – to the shocking scale of mass surveillance and personal data collection perpetrated by the agency, is still in exile.

That’s because in his country, instead of being honored like, say, Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, Snowden is still treated as a fugitive from justice.

Snowden has been indicted as a “spy” and is considered to be one by many, even though the revelations from the leaked documents were not handed to another country, but publicly released to benefit the rights of the citizens of his own.

This is something that Donald Trump clearly took into consideration when he was “close” to pardoning Snowden near the end of his first stint in office. However, that eventually didn’t happen, but now, a number of figures likely to hold top positions in the new US administration think the time has come.

Among them is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump wants as his Health and Human Services secretary. Another is Donald Trump Jr., who is also in favor of pardoning several other whistleblowers, and a candidate for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has long espoused a similar stance.

The man who originally helped Snowden publish his revelations, lawyer, and journalist Glenn Greenwald, thinks it makes perfect sense for Trump to this time go ahead and pardon Snowden, not least since some of the abuses the whistleblower exposed in 2013 have in the meantime affected the president as well.

“And if Trump’s goal is to bring transparency to those agencies there is no one who has done that more bravely and honestly than Snowden,” said Greenwald, who in 2013 worked with several major newspapers in the US and around the world to bring the Snowden files to the public.

Some of those newspapers – the Washington Post and the Guardian even won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

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Mark Zuckerberg Tells Joe Rogan That Biden Admin Would ‘Scream’ And ‘Curse’ At Meta Employees To Censor ‘True’ Content

Published on January 11, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Cohen

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan on Friday that officials in President Joe Biden’s administration would yell and hurl profanities at his company’s employees over content censorship.

The Biden administration pushed Facebook to censor posts about COVID-19 that it deemed misinformation, according to documents published by House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan in July 2023. Zuckerberg, on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” revealed that also Meta faced investigations and backlash after Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” in July 2021 for not censoring so-called COVID-19 misinformation.

WATCH:

“Basically, these people from the Biden Administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg said. “And it’s like these documents are — it’s all kind of out there.”

Rogan asked if Meta had recorded any of the calls, but Zuckerberg said he did not believe so.

“I mean, there are emails. The emails are published. It’s all kind of out there …. And basically, it just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not going to — we’re not going to take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous,’” Zuckerberh said. “They wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV, talking about how ten years from now or something, you’re going to see an ad that says, ‘Okay, if you took a COVID vaccine, you’re eligible, like for this kind of payment,’ like this sort of like class-action lawsuit-type meme. And they’re like, ‘No, you have to take that down.’”

“We just said, ‘No, we’re not going to take down humor and satire. We’re not going to take down things that are true.’ And then at some point, I guess — I don’t know — it flipped a bit,” he added. “I mean, Biden, when he was — he gave some statement at some point, I don’t know if it was a press conference or to some journalist, where he basically was like, ‘These guys are killing people.’ And I don’t know. Then like all these different agencies and branches of government basically just like started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal.”

Facebook executives believed they were engaged in a “knife fight” with Biden’s White House on COVID-19 censorship, according to a House Judiciary Committee report published in May.

Zuckerberg in August expressed remorse that Facebook caved to pressure from the Biden administration to censor content in a letter to Jordan. He wrote that senior Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook teams to censor COVID-19 content that the platform otherwise would not have suppressed, and voiced frustration when Facebook disagreed.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

Zuckerberg also alleged in 2022 on “The Joe Rogan Experience” that the FBI warned Facebook of a “Russian propaganda” dump just before the Hunter Biden laptop story broke.

“The FBI basically came to us and some folks on our team and said, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert, we thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election and we have noticed that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that, so be vigilant,’” he said.

The Meta CEO said he could not recall whether the FBI specifically mentioned the Hunter Biden laptop story, but asserted it fit “the pattern.”

The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Meta referred the DCNF to documents released by the House Judiciary Committee and Jordan.

Business

Facebook / Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan Experience

Published on January 10, 2025

Duane Rolheiser

Earlier this week Mark Zuckerberg rocked the world of information with the news that Facebook, Instagram, and his other Meta properties would no longer use third party fact checking groups to censor information. As the week wraps up, Zuckerberg sits down for an extended conversation with Joe Rogan. For anyone interested in the world of information, this is a must see / listen.

From the Joe Rogan Experience

Mark Zuckerberg is the chief executive of Meta Platforms Inc., the company behind Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, Meta Quest, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Orion augmented reality glasses, and other digital platforms, devices, and services.