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Comment by rbreve | Hacker News Reader

Will Trump pardon Snowden? that will be interesting.

I don't see how anything else could happen here, unless the USA is truly a lawless country where the rich and powerful is in control without any consequences. So yeah, Snowden will still be on the run.

It's going to the supreme court which will overturn I guarantee it.

Why so sure? Are you saying this program probably was legal after all and this court made a mistake?

Since this court ruled that another court was incorrect when ruling that the program was legal and allowed it to proceed it is not outside the realm of possibility that another court would find this one was incorrect. I certainly wouldn't say it is anywhere near guaranteed though.

I fully agree. USA is lawless, for example U.S. blacklists International Criminal Court prosecutor over Afghanistan war crimes probe: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-icc-sanctions/u-s-bla...

International law doesn’t exist as we would understand it, the global system’s inherent anarchy and thus lack of law, or lawlessness, is essentially axiomatic in IR.

It may seem nitpicky, but I genuinely don’t think people understand how utterly anarchic geopolitics is, even at the height of unipolar stability in decades past.

Yeah, this needs to be fixed (not simply made worse and worse)

Now would be about the best time for him to make that move. With elections upcoming and all that.

Trump's pardoning of Snowden would lose more presidential election support than it would win. Sure, there are plenty of people who would support the decision to pardon Snowden, but I can't see them being the type of people to vote for Trump based on that. Existing Trump supporters, on the other hand, I could see "punishing" Trump for his weakness in pardoning a "traitor who fled to Russia".

He can pardon him to test the effects on polling. If it helps, great. If it hurts him, get Snowden back, arrest him, and claim it was a trick to get the traitor that Obama couldn't get all along.

Is un-pardoning a thing? I'd have figured that a pardon would mean that Trump wouldn't be able to follow it up with his arrest and claiming the pardon was a 'trick'.

Just writing that, though, it feels dirtily and precisely "Trump".

edit: grammar

You pardon certain crimes. As an example, you pardon Snowden for "all crimes related to NSA leaks," and then charge him with some kind if tax avoidance. It'd be dirty as hell, and make any trial much longer, but it's possible.

Eh... the old neocons aren't the same breed of conservative that is the Trump supporters. They seem very much in favour of pardoning Snowden.

You assume it is possible for Trump to lose presidential support. Just as he said, "I could shoot somebody in the middle of 5th avenue and not lose voters". People don't care who gets elected, they really just vote party-line.

However, if Snowden were pardoned, and Cannabis were legalized, I do think Trump would win centrist and libertarians.

The media and the DNC would spin it as proof Trump is controlled by Russia. That's far more certain than some Republican voters disagreeing with the idea after considering this judgment.

No, they like Russia, and would be happy to consider Snowden's previous masters 'the Deep State'. The trouble there is that it only furthers a status where 'everything that is not literally Trump is the Deep State and must be destroyed'.

It's seriously weird to have a President and a large faction of Americans actively working to fight America as it currently stands. I'm sympathetic to ideas of reform, but they're not talking about reform, they're talking in terms like rounding up all those people and putting 'em in camps as unredeemable criminals/enemies. Nobody going on about 'Deep State' or 'Pizzagate' etc. are talking about reforms, they are behaving like it's an occupying army of absolute monsters that could never possibly be reformed or improved.

“Caesar” became a hereditary title when Rome shifted from Republic to dictatorship.

I sometimes wonder if “President” will be the same.

After he releases his tax records.

Would make him more popular.

Why should anyone think that would happen? Trump has no particular moral standard, does not particularly care whether or not laws are being followed, and only does what he believes will get some applause from his base at any given moment (and his base could not care less about Snowden).

Trump's base is very pro-military and a lot of them believe that Snowden put military lives at risk (and also confuse him with Chelsea Manning / Julian Assange). So I don't see how that could ever happen.

That might prevent it from happening before the election, but win or lose he's still President between November and January and win or lose this is his last election.

You would think that with all the baseless complaining he’s been doing on Twitter about Obama “spying” on his campaign in 2016 he’d say see! This was illegal after all. Let’s pardon Snowden and fix this so that future presidential candidates can’t be spied on like I was. He’d have the support of both the left and the right even though he wasn’t actually illegally spied on.

Which is ironic seeing how Assange helped him get elected.

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