President Donald Trump has shown no desire to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin about Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower pictured here last year. | Alexander Koerner/Getty Images Trump-Putin summit mystery: What about Snowden? Trump has called for the fugitive NSA leaker’s execution and once guaranteed that Russian President Vladimir Putin would hand him over. But there’s no sign that Trump is pressing the issue.

As President Donald Trump prepares to meet Vladimir Putin on Monday, lawmakers from both parties want him to demand that the Russian president hand over 12 hackers newly indicted for sabotaging the 2016 election. That’s unlikely, especially since Trump mostly shrugs off talk of Russian election meddling.

But Putin is also harboring another hacker wanted by the U.S. — one whose guilt Trump has never questioned: Edward Snowden.


As a candidate, Trump “guarantee[d]” he would bring home the infamous National Security Agency whistleblower. As president, however, he has shown no desire to confront Putin about Snowden.

Why not? Experts and former U.S. officials say that passions have cooled over the fugitive who rocked the intelligence community five years ago last month. More recent hacking scandals have overshadowed his actions. And Trump himself has become a harsh critic of U.S. surveillance programs, which he claims without evidence the Obama administration wrongly used against him.

Even so, some experts think handing over Snowden would be an easy way for Putin to do Trump a favor — giving the president a victory that would especially please intelligence and national security officials angry he hasn’t done more to counter Russian election meddling. Before Trump was sworn in in January 2017, former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell wrote that handing over Snowden would be “the perfect inauguration gift” from Putin to Trump.

“If Trump wants this as a victory then I don’t see why Putin wouldn’t give it to him,” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago Law School professor who served on a foreign intelligence surveillance panel created by President Barack Obama shortly after Snowden’s leaks. “If Putin wants to either do a favor for Trump or make Trump look good, and if Trump wants this, it would be an easy thing for Putin to do,” Stone said.

“You can almost see the picture of Snowden in handcuffs being dragged into Air Force One,” he added.

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Snowden sought refuge in Moscow in mid-2013 after publicly releasing troves of top-secret NSA files he stole while he was a private contractor. He has called himself a whistleblower exposing surveillance abuses, but many current and former U.S. officials consider him a traitor or worse.

Trump is among them: “Snowden is a spy who has caused great damage to the U.S. A spy in the old days, when our country was respected and strong, would be executed,” he declared on Twitter in April 2014.

As a 2016 candidate, Trump said he could get Snowden back from the Russians, who granted him political asylum. Promising to befriend Putin and repair U.S.-Russian relations, Trump insisted that the Russian leader — who he said had no respect for Obama — would “never” keep someone like Snowden if Trump were president.

“Look … if I'm president, Putin says [to Snowden], ‘Hey, boom, you're gone.’ I guarantee you this,” Trump said in July 2015.

Since then, it appears Snowden has fallen off Trump’s to-do list. And some believe the Russian president likes keeping him under his wing, even at a time when he wants to strike deals with Trump.

“I don’t think it’s high on Trump’s agenda, and, actually, I don’t think Putin has a big interest in extraditing him,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch and a leading defender of Snowden’s “heroic” leaks.

Snowden remains in hiding in Russia with his partner, Lindsay Mills, mostly keeping a low profile. Just last month, however, Mills shared a rare photo of Snowden on her Instagram account, at what appears to be a restaurant overlooking the Moscow skyline.

Snowden himself addressed the possibility of extradition in May, in a podcast interview with The Intercept.

“Donald Trump is going to be coming out to Russia, you know, whenever he can,” Snowden told journalist Mehdi Hasan, before Monday’s meeting in Helsinki had been announced.

“It seems clear there is no one in this world he loves more than the Russian president. Will he try to make some kind of deal? Maybe,” he added. “Can I do anything about it? No.”

Trump is not the only top U.S. official to have called for Snowden’s return and execution. As a member of Congress in 2016, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo echoed Trump’s opinion. “He should be brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence,” Pompeo told C-SPAN in February of that year.

Snowden’s ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner declined to comment for this article.

Following the beginning of his June 2013 leaks, Snowden commanded world headlines for months. But even as top lawmakers demanded the extradition of 25 Russians who have now been indicted by the Justice Department for 2016 election interference, Snowden went unmentioned.

"These individuals must be brought to the United States so that they can stand trial, and you should demand that Mr. Putin hand them over,” eight senior Democratic senators, including the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote in a Saturday letter to Trump that did not mention the former NSA contractor.

If Putin were to send Snowden back to the United States, he’d await trial in a prison cell. The espionage charges against him carry decades of jail time and bar him from using a whistleblower defense in trial. Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told Russia in 2013 the U.S. would not seek the death penalty for Snowden, as a way to prevent Russia from granting the former contractor political asylum. Holder told Russia the charges against Snowden did not carry a death penalty and that the government would not pursue the death penalty even if he were charged with additional crimes that carry a death penalty. But it’s not clear whether Trump’s Justice Department would agree.

Even some of Snowden’s fiercest critics suggest that Helsinki is not the place to discuss his fate, especially if Trump and Putin will be confronting substantive policy issues like the Middle East.

“If the effort is to frame up a solution to Syria, then he shouldn’t come up. If it is more of a ceremonial meeting, then it would be appropriate for the topic to be on the agenda,” said Republican Mike Rogers, who served as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at the time of Snowden’s leaks.

Rogers has denounced Snowden as a traitor who put American lives at risk — even once saying, without specific evidence, that he should face murder charges. But he suggested that Moscow itself, where some believe Snowden’s freedom is limited, is a kind of prison for him.

“He is absolutely miserable in a very controlled environment in Russia. May be the best punishment,” Rogers told POLITICO in an email.

Matthew Waxman, director of the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School and a former senior George W. Bush administration official, said he doesn’t expect Snowden to come up at Monday’s summit.

But it’s impossible to be sure, he added — especially given the Trumpian spectacle Snowden’s return would involve.

“Trump is unpredictable, and he seems sometimes to care more about the showmanship of deals than their substance,” he said.

Waxman added that Putin “will have studied Trump's psychology carefully” and could offer up Snowden if he thought it would help him win other agreements from his American counterpart.

At the time of the leaks, Trump said it would be “pathetic” if the United States took years to get Snowden back on American soil. And in other interviews, Trump blamed the slow pace of extradition on Obama’s tense relationship with Putin.

“He hates Obama. He doesn't respect Obama. Obama doesn't like him either. But he has no respect for Obama. Has a hatred for Obama,” Trump said.

But where Putin sits now, Snowden might be more useful inside Russia than out. Some critics say Snowden has been notably quiet overall about Russia’s authoritarian practices, even as he castigates the Trump administration, U.S. intelligence agencies and many American technology companies on a Twitter account with 3.8 million followers.

“Snowden represents a rare case of somebody who is seeking Russia rather than fleeing Putin’s autocratic rule,” Roth said. “That’s a way to make his own autocratic rule seem less bad. ... He’s much more valuable from Putin’s perspective in highlighting the U.S. government’s mass invasion of privacy.”

Snowden insists he does not not turn a blind eye to abuses within Russia for his own safety. Asked by The Intercept about the possibility of his extradition, he said: “[W]ould I sell out my principles to make that less likely? No.” And he did recently criticize “ballot stuffing” in Russia’s March presidential election, which installed Putin for another six-year term, raising fresh speculation that whatever alliance he might have with Putin’s government is cracking.

“Demand justice; demand laws and courts that matter. Take your future back,” Snowden added.

Roth said he doubts that conservative Republicans care much about Snowden any longer, diminishing Trump’s interest in him.

“I have no doubt Trump would like to get Snowden,” Roth said. “I’m not sure this is an issue that plays with his base. ... I don’t see him really going to bat on this issue.”

One reason some doubt that Putin would send Snowden back to the U.S. is that Russia last year extended his asylum until 2020. Russian officials maintain they cannot remove him against his will.

"President Putin addressed the issue some years ago," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview last month. "He said this is for Edward Snowden to decide."

Lavrov added that Putin has "never" discussed Snowden with the Trump administration.

“We respect his rights as an individual,” Lavrov said. “I don’t know why people would start asking this particular question in relation to the summit. Edward Snowden is the master of his own destiny."