The paper waded into the debate with a piece titled 'Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower.' NYT calls for Snowden clemency

The New York Times is calling on President Barack Obama to make a clemency or plea bargain deal with National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden to bring him home.

The paper’s editorial board waded into the traitor-vs.-hero debate with a piece titled “ Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower” out Thursday, writing that although Snowden may have broken the law when he stole and revealed details about the NSA’s surveillance tactics, he provided an important service in exposing the tactics.


“He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service,” the Times board wrote. “It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.”

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The Times also took issue with a past statement from Obama that Snowden should have used other avenues afforded to whistleblowers to air his concerns with the NSA program, saying that Obama’s whistleblower protections didn’t apply to contractors like Snowden and saying his superiors ignored him when he did raise concerns to them.

“In retrospect, Mr. Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not,” the Times wrote.

In a tweet, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who worked closely with Snowden to publish his material in The Guardian, called the editorial “remarkable.”

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The New York Times has been working with the British publication The Guardian to publish information provided by Snowden since this summer. The Guardian posted its own editorial urging clemency for Snowden on Thursday.

Snowden has been given a year of amnesty to live in Russia, where he traveled after fleeing the U.S. to China shortly before his leaks were published. He has remained there out of fear of prosecution were he to return to the U.S.

The government has charged Snowden with espionage.