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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

IANAL but if Obama gave Snowden a last minute pardon before he left office, wouldn't that legally shield him from the Trump Administration?

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Changes nothing. Enemies of the intelligence community have a certain proclivity of accidentally falling down stairs multiple times in a row.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)

Or have their cars randomly accelerate out of control.

If the CIA wants some one dead there are considerably less conspicuous ways to kill some one than a pretty public car crash.

Not to mention there are plenty of journalists that have covered and exposed worse things about the intelligence community that are just fine.

Heck Clinton's bad humor aside Assange is still alive, so is Snowden do you really think they are both out of reach of the US military or any of it's TLA's?

You really think that it's that hard to put a bullet in Assange's head anytime he peaks out of a window at the embassy? Heck I'm surprised an enemy state willing to cause the US irreversible political and PR damage didn't do it as a false flag yet.

IANALE, but I think you can only be pardoned if you've been convicted of something. If you've not even been officially charged (let alone, convicted), what will Obama pardon him for?

IANALE-either but from my understanding the Pardon is so wide (only restriction being preventing from stopping an impeachment) that the President can and has Pardoned people preemptively. There are some other limits on it as well for practical uses.

Most notably, President Ford pardoned President Nixon for basically anything he might have done as opposed to specific charges.

Slate Article on the Subject: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

> Pardoned people preemptively.

Preemptive of any investigation/indictment/etc. Not, as I understand it, in advance of the illegal action itself. (Not a distinction relevant here, of course, just clarifying)

Obama just gave an interview in Germany where he argued that he can't pardon Snowden.

Interview: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-interview-...

That's baffling. It's happened before multiple times, and Obama really should know that. Anyone have a conjecture as to what's going on there? Does he in fact not know? Is he somehow confused? Is he just lying? Were the previous examples secretly invalid? Is there a meaningful distinction between this case and those?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon

The President's power to pardon is almost unlimited. Anyone may be given "a full, free, and absolute pardon for crimes he has committed or may have committed". c.f. Ford/Nixon

Not true. As others have pointed out, Ford gave Nixon a blanket pardon for things he hadn't been charged with.

The only constitutional restrictions on presidential pardon are

1) He can only pardon crimes against the federal government. That means a presidential pardon won't get you out of a state rap, and it also means he can't use the pardon to affect civil cases.

2) His pardons can't affect impeachment cases. Most notably, he can't pardon himself to avoid impeachment.

Most legal scholars say the president also probably couldn't get away with issuing pardons for acts that haven't occurred yet, since that amounts to a change in the law and encroaches on Congress's powers.

Depending on how the pardon was worded, it would probably mean the Trump administration could not take any legal action against Snowden for events covered by the pardon.

As others have alluded to, it wouldn't necessarily preclude illegal actions, though it could certainly change the optics on them.

Yes, but would likely create a tremendously yuge backlash from the intelligence community, and turn them against the Democratic party for a very long time. You think Wikileaks and Hillary's emails were bad? Piss off the intel community and have them turning their mighty tools of deception and surveillance on the entire DNC...

Hmm, I hadn't thought of that. While I think your latter point is a bit ridiculous (but not implausible), I agree that there would be a lot to lose from a pardon and very little to gain.

After all, Snowden gave up his right to autonomy in 2013. His life now is entirely within the hands of history.

The lightness with which you can say that a branch of the State could just "turn on internal enemies" is something straight out of Soviet Russia and other unsavoury regimes. Is this what the almighty US are now, a bunch of mafia organizations fighting for power with all the dirty tricks they can muster?

Obama should do The Right Thing and screw the intelligence community - what have they done for him in 8 years anyway? Started bad wars and lied under oath.

There are lots of people in the intelligence community that are appalled by domestic surveillance efforts as well.

Besides, if your accusation is correct (that they are so mindless and stupid as a group that their reaction to a controversial presidential pardon would be to go after the political party associated with that president), then the US should just fire every single last one of them and start from scratch. Seriously. If that's where things are at, then they're all negative contributors anyway. But I don't think it's that bad, I've got more faith in humanity than you do apparently (for the time being at least :( ).

> There are lots of people in the intelligence community that are appalled by domestic surveillance efforts as well.

[citation needed]. I've never heard anyone from the intel community say anything other than that they need more domestic surveillance powers and that we should shut up and stop complaining about the ones in place already.

Seriously. The intelligence community answers to the executive. If they don't like the pardon they can go fuck themselves for that reason alone.

Do you have any reason to actually believe this, or is just something that sounds good to your gut?

We'll then these traitors that are within the US intelligence community who illegally target Americans citizens will reveal themselves and be sent to jail for treason.

The intelligence community that created these illegal programs will be held responsible for their crimes against America.

In your plan, how far do the prosecutions go? Is every last coder to be prosecuted for their crimes? In 60 years will we still be putting former NSA analysts on trial for treason like the Nazis (since treason, like murder, has no statute of limitations)? I'm legitimately asking.

I think the intelligence community is a bit more rational than that, meaning if it's in their interests to turn their tools of deception and surveillance onto anyone, then they don't need an excuse of anger to do so. Interests are interests.

I don't think that would stop the T admin to kill him (i.e unofficially).

I doubt Russia would take kindly the US violating its territorial sovereignty and carrying out a high-profile assassination on a political refugee minutes away from the Kremlin palace. In fact, that is pretty much a sure move for war and an obvious casus belli. If that sounds unlikely to you, please ponder what choices this left the Russian federation with: look weak and feeble, or escalate.

It would also antagonize a lot of countries and almost mechanically create domestic pressure for foreign leaders to take a stand against the US. There is literally no better way to make non-alignment a popular political stance. Not only that, but the second gulf war has already harmed the credibility of the international order that the US and its allies have worked hard to instaurate. The US did not ratify the ICC, ignores UN war laws, operates an alternative detention facility to escape its own domestic civil rights protections, performs extrajudicial killings all around the ME and now take down political opponents abroad. That could very well be the straw that breaks the camel's back. And if it isn't, what comes next should. Not taking a moral stance on either of the things mentioned above, just observing that the increasing dissonance between official US narrative on foreign policy, and its real-world applications can only harm its prestige and credibility.

I can't think of a more terrible move for the USG than murdering Snowden.

tl;dr: The harm has been done already, killing him would only make things worse.

Suppose he gets killed by Russia, making it look like the USA did it. Suppose the USA agrees to this in advance.

I'm sure it can get even weirder.

I agree. Though I really doubt we'd get an all out war. Things would just an escalate. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the US that Russia would like to assassinate.

When the Russians did the same nothing really happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...

Putin might be mad, but they wouldn't give 2 fucks about Snowden, if Russia got anything in return for granting him asylum they already got it.

That said the US would more likely want to exfiltrate him for this specific reason, they would want to know if and what did Snowden handed over to Russian intelligence.

Russia performed assassinations on foreign soil before, and it didn't had any major effects.

The Obama administration hasn't exactly shied away from extrajudicial killings of Americans. If that were a practical possibility I suspect it would already have happened.

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