Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has reaffirmed his commitment to pardoning accused U.S. spy and anti-surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden if elected.
The Kennedy scion launched a petition Monday calling for a pardon for Snowden — while praising the now Russian resident for exposing highly classified domestic government surveillance operations.
“Edward Snowden is an American hero,” Kennedy, 70, said in a video. “Instead of imprisoning Snowden, I’m going to build a statue of him and maybe (WikiLeaks) Julian Assange somewhere near the Washington Press Club or maybe outside CIA headquarters in Langley, like a civics lesson for the Republic.
“Snowden, who has been in exile for more than a decade, performed a vital public service by revealing that our government was spying on millions of law-abiding American citizens, in violation of numerous laws and our fundamental right to privacy” , Kennedy said. said.
“The America I love does not punish whistleblowers. Truth-tellers who defend free speech and attempt to return America to its democratic and humanitarian ideals should be revered, not prosecuted,” the candidate said.
Kennedy’s video message highlighted his views on Snowden’s persecution by featuring a compilation of former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump criticizing the alleged traitor.
Snowden, 40, leaked a series of highly classified documents to the Guardian, the Washington Post and several other media outlets in 2013, highlighting a litany of surveillance programs by the NSA as well as allied organizations.
The information dump featured rampant collection of metadata about people – information about when and to whom a phone call or email message was sent.
Eventually, Snowden fled to Russia, where he was granted asylum and where he currently resides. He is wanted by the United States for espionage and theft of government equipment.
Kennedy has a long history of attacking the top brass of the US intelligence community.
He previously said he believed the CIA was involved in the murder of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and even raised the possibility that the spy agency played a role in the murder of his eponymous father, l Former Attorney General of the United States.
Critics have accused RFK Jr. of peddling conspiracy theories about the intelligence community and other issues as well.
The candidate has pledged to rein in the US intelligence community if elected and has already pledged to pardon Snowden and Assange, who was accused of espionage by the US for publishing damning classified documents, including those involving the US military.
“I will teach the American public a lesson in civics by pardoning Julian Assange and Edward Snowden on my first day in office,” Kennedy promised in January.
“You can make me do this,” he later claimed on X.
Trump, 77, who once suggested Snowden “should be executed,” seriously considered deploying his veto pen for the self-proclaimed whistleblower in a late administration coup de grace, but ultimately denied.
New York Post
