RFK Jr. renews pledge to pardon ‘American hero’ Edward Snowden if elected: ‘I’m going to build a statue to him’
Independent presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has re-upped his commitment to pardon US accused spy and anti-surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden if elected.
The Kennedy scion rolled out a petition Monday calling for the pardon of Snowden — while hailing 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 jailing Snowden, I’m going to build a statue to him and maybe to [WikiLeaks] Julian Assange somewhere near the Washington Press Club or perhaps outside the CIA headquarters in Langley as a civics lesson to the Republic.
“Snowden, who has been in exile for more than a decade, performed a critical public service by revealing that our government had been spying on millions of law-abiding American citizens, in violation of numerous laws and our fundamental right to privacy,” Kennedy said.
“The America I love doesn’t punish whistleblowers. Truth-tellers who champion free speech and try to return America to its democratic and humanitarian ideals should be revered, not prosecuted,” the candidate said.
Kennedy’s video message drove home his point about Snowden’s persecution by featuring a compilation of former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump criticizing the alleged traitor.
Snowden, 40, funneled a tranche of highly confidential documents to the Guardian, the Washington Post and several other outlets in 2013, shedding light on a litany of surveillance programs by the NSA as well as Allied organizations.
The information dump featured the rampant collection of people’s metadata — information about when and to whom a phone call or electronic message was sent.
Ultimately, Snowden fled to Russia, where he was granted asylum and currently resides. He is wanted on US charges of espionage as well as theft of government material.
Kennedy has long railed against the top brass of the US intelligence community.
He previously claimed he believes that the CIA was involved in the murder of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and even floated the possibility that the spy agency played a role in the killing of his eponymous father, the former US attorney general.
Critics have accused RFK Jr. of trafficking in conspiracy theories about the intelligence community and on other issues as well.
The candidate has vowed to rein in the US intelligence community if elected and previously committed to pardoning both Snowden and Assange, who has been charged with espionage by the US for publishing damning classified documents, including those involving the American military.
“I’m going to give a civics lesson to the American public by pardoning Julian Assange and Edward Snowden my first day in office,” Kennedy pledged in January.
“You can hold me to this,” he later affirmed on X.
Trump, 77, who once suggested that Snowden “should be executed,” seriously considered deploying his veto pen for the self-described whistleblower during a late administration clemency kick but ultimately declined.
