Vermont’s congressional delegation is split on the idea of clemency for NSA whistleblower and fugitive Edward Snowden.
Snowden was a contractor for the National Security Agency when he gathered thousands of pages of classified documents about the agency’s covert surveillance activities and later passed them off to journalists.
The documents have sparked an international debate about NSA surveillance, which included collecting data about millions of Americans’ phone calls, bypassing data encryption, and conducting surveillance on foreign heads of state.
Snowden is in Russia, where he was granted asylum. A recent New York Times editorial called on the U.S. government to grant him clemency and allow his return. Some lawmakers in Washington came out in full support of the idea, while others remain against any special deals for Snowden.
Sen. Bernie Sanders called for: “some form of clemency or a plea agreement [for Snowden] that would spare him a long prison sentence or permanent exile from the country whose freedoms he cared enough about to risk his own freedom.”
Rep. Peter Welch also said clemency could be a possibility, but he said he doesn’t have enough information to say for sure.
Welch said the suggestion of clemency is “premature for me, but what I’m saying is that we should be flexible because the public has clearly benefited from the knowledge of what the NSA is doing.”
Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “remains opposed to clemency,” according to a spokesperson. Leahy said at a press conference last week that Snowden broke the law, and he shouldn’t be seen as a hero.
"If he wanted to be a real whistleblower we have provisions where he could come to the Congress, be protected and whistle blow. Instead he went first to China, and talked about what he was doing, and then he went to Russia," Leahy told reporters last week. "He applauds their openness in these countries, these are countries with a controlled press, a corrupt legal system and he prefers that to here, where we have an open and free press and probably the best judicial system in the (world), so he and I have a basic disagreement on that."
Sanders also sent a letter last week to Gen. Keith Alexander, who oversees the NSA, to ask if the agency had ever collected information on members of Congress or other elected officials. Sanders’ letter hadn’t received a response as of Monday, but an NSA press statement failed to answer the senator’s question.
VPR's Peter Hirschfeld contributed to this report.