Van Jones, a former White House special advisor, blasted President Barack Obama on Wednesday for cracking down on whistleblowers.

“I love this president, everybody knows I love this president, but this is ridiculous,” he said on CNN. “First of all, we do have a domestic spying program, and what we need to be able to do is figure out how to balance these things, not pretend like there’s no balancing to be done.”

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“But much more important, he said something else that I thought that was really awful,” Jones continued. “He said that if somebody like Snowden wanted to be a whistle-blower, they could have gone ahead.

“Well, hold on a second, sir. That is — you are right now prosecuting more whistleblowers – not only than any American president, that every American president combined! So, you can’t then come out on Leno and yuck it up and say, well, whistleblowers, come on out and we’ll treat you right because you haven’t been doing that.”

Speaking on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Tuesday night, Obama denied the National Security Agency was targeting people who lived within the United States.

“We don’t have a domestic spying program,” he said.

Watch video, uploaded to YouTube, below: