{"id":69063,"date":"2016-11-21T11:02:16","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T16:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=69063"},"modified":"2016-11-21T11:02:16","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T16:02:16","slug":"obama-says-he-cant-pardon-snowden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=69063","title":{"rendered":"Obama says he can\u2019t pardon Snowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

David sends us a link from ArsTechnica<\/a> which reports on an Obama statement to the German Newspaper Der Spiegel which questioned him about the chances of Edward Snowden getting a presidential pardon;<\/p>\n

Obama replied: “I can’t pardon somebody who hasn’t gone before a court and presented themselves, so that’s not something that I would comment on at this point.” He continued:<\/p>\n

I think that Mr. Snowden raised some legitimate concerns. How he did it was something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community. If everybody took the approach that I make my own decisions about these issues, then it would be very hard to have an organized government or any kind of national security system.<\/p>\n

At the point at which Mr. Snowden wants to present himself before the legal authorities and make his arguments or have his lawyers make his arguments, then I think those issues come into play. Until that time, what I’ve tried to suggest — both to the American people, but also to the world — is that we do have to balance this issue of privacy and security.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I agree that Snowden doesn’t deserve a pardon but the president isn’t being entirely truthful here. Richard Nixon was never charged before President Ford pardoned him. Most of the draft dodgers of the Vietnam War hadn’t been to court when Jimmy Carter pardoned them all, by crime, not by name, on his first day in office.<\/p>\n

And as part of the Iran nuclear deal he negotiated, Obama himself pardoned three Iranian-American men who had been indicted but had not stood trial.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While it appears that the president has arrived at the correct decision, he’s not being truthful about the reasons that he arrived at the decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David sends us a link from ArsTechnica which reports on an Obama statement to the German … Obama says he can\u2019t pardon Snowden<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-barack-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/38186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}