RT
Former President Donald Trump has said he was “very close to going the other way” on issuing a pardon for Julian Assange or Edward Snowden before he left the White House, ultimately deciding not to grant clemency to either.
During an interview with the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens this week, Trump was asked why he failed to issue pardons to WikiLeaks co-founder Assange and National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Snowden, which activists had been pushing for in the president’s final months in office.
“You have two sides of it,” Trump said. He described their separate situations as, respectively, a “sort of a spy deal going on” and “somebody that’s exposing real corruption,” but without indicating which description applied to which person, concluding only that he felt “a little bit more strongly about one than the other.”
Media reports earlier this year indicated Trump had been convinced by aides that an Assange or a Snowden pardon would upset Senate Republicans, who were gearing up to vote in his impeachment trial at the time. He also appeared to negatively reference Assange and “spying” at one point, though he did not elaborate.
“There [were] some spying things…
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