Free Republic

Tucker Carlson & @ggreenwald Discuss Assange & Snowden T: " @POTUS could pardon Julian Assange right now & end this. Is that correct?" G: "He could pardon him & Edward Snowden...the only people who would be angry would be Susan Rice, John Brennan, Jim Comey, and James Clapper." Video...

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida became the latest Republican congressman Thursday to recommend President Trump pardon former U.S. intelligence contractor and leaker Edward J. Snowden. Mr. Gaetz, one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest defenders in Congress, suggested on Twitter that the president intervene and end the government’s case against the wanted secret-spiller. “Edward @Snowden deserves a pardon from President @realDonaldTrump,” Mr. Gaetz said on Twitter in a post tagging each of their accounts on the social media service. Mr. Snowden quickly shared the congressman’s suggestion with his own 4.3 million Twitter followers, while neither Mr. Trump nor the White House offered...

(Reuters) - Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth. In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional. Snowden, who fled to Russia in the aftermath of the 2013...

NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden ruled unlawful A National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program has been ruled unlawful, seven years after it was exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The surveillance of millions of Americans' telephone records first came to light in 2013. Now, the US Court of Appeals has ruled intelligence leaders who publicly defended the program lied. And Mr Snowden has said he feels vindicated by the ruling. FBI worried that Ring doorbells are spying on police Microsoft bars facial recognition sales to police He currently lives in exile in Moscow but, last year, expressed his wish to return...

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program that collected data on Americans' telephone calls was illegal and possibly unconstitutional. A three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the program, which was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden and officially ended in 2015, violated U.S. surveillance laws and potentially the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. Despite their conclusion about the surveillance program, the judges upheld the convictions of four Somali immigrants who brought a legal challenge against it on appeal. Wednesday's ruling came seven years after the four were convicted in...

A federal court has ruled that the US intelligence’s surveillance program exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden was unlawful, and possibly unconstitutional. A US federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that the controversial National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden was illegal. The ruling stopped short of calling the program unconstitutional. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said that the program, under which the NSA collected and analyzed bulk data provided by telecommunications companies, was in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and could have been unconstitutional. "Seven years ago, as the news...

A federal appeals court has found that the US National Security Agency's controversial bulk collection of citizens' phone records was against the law. "We conclude that the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment and did violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ("FISA") when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans," the opinion by Judge Berzon, published Sept. 2, says.

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILLIt’s been seven years since Edward Snowden rocked the world, and in America the ground is shaking once again. In a promising turn of events, headlines have seen an unprecedented outpouring of support for Snowden from high-ranking American officials. In a press conference Saturday, President Trump stated that he is “going to take a look at [Snowden’s case] very strongly.” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and two sitting members of Congress, Reps. Justin Amash (L-Mich.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), have also taken to Twitter to support the...

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said on Sunday that pardoning former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden “would be unconscionable” after President Trump said he was considering the idea at a recent press conference. “Edward Snowden is a traitor. He is responsible for the largest and most damaging release of classified info in US history. He handed over US secrets to Russian and Chinese intelligence putting our troops and our nation at risk,” Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, tweeted on Sunday afternoon, adding; “Pardoning him would be unconscionable.” A day before Cheney’s comments, Trump said...

Q: "Do you want to give Edward Snowden a pardon and bring him back?" President Trump: "I'm going to look at it." Video...

@RandPaulI’m one of them. ⁦@Snowden revealed that Trump-haters Clapper and Comey among others were illegally spying on Americans. Clapper lied to Congress about it. @realDonaldTrump should pardon Snowden! Article: Trump: ‘A lot of people’ think Edward Snowden ‘not being treated fairly’

“I’m terrified, I’m terrified that she’s not going to be treated fairly,” the mother of accused leaker Reality Sara Winner told CBS News after her daughter’s arrest under the Espionage Act for stealing Top Secret documents and passing them along to a media outlet. Billie-Jean Davis says her daughter is afraid that law enforcement will “make her disappear,” but then at the same time claims that the US government wants to make an example of Winner. “That’s not fair,” she tells CBS:(VIDEO-AT-LINK) The mother and stepfather of 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, the NSA contractor accused of leaking government secrets, are...

Now that Reality Winner's in legal jeopardy for abusing her paid position and illegally distributed classified documents to the media and issued a threat to the White House, maybe being a "pretty, white and cute" female is something that could be exploited because she is just so much smarter than everyone else.

On Monday, a Texas civil rights attorney launched a clemency petition for National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner in Dallas. The attorney, Alison Grinter, encountered Winner through Crystal Mason, a Texas mother who served time alongside Winner in a Fort Worth federal prison after receiving a five-year sentence for “illegal voting” in the 2016 presidential election. Mason and Winner became friends in the facility’s newsroom, where they spent long hours watching TV news and debating current events. After hearing about Winner from Mason, Grinter began corresponding with the whistleblower’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis, on Twitter. Last year, the two women drove...

“She called us yesterday night. She asked if we could help out with relocating her cat and dog,” Winner-Davis said. Winner-Davis said her daughter never talked about her work, and her family did not know the specifics of her recently acquired job as a government contractor. She added that her daughter, while quiet about her job, was outspoken about her beliefs. “She’s very passionate. Very passionate about her views and things like that, but she’s never to my knowledge been active in politics or any of that,” said Winner-Davis. On Twitter, she expressed frequent dissatisfaction with Trump administration policies, and...

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden violated secrecy agreements with the U.S. government that allow it to claim proceeds from a memoir he published earlier this year, a judge ruled Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled that Snowden is liable for breach of contract with the government because he published “Permanent Record,” without submitting it for a pre-publication review, in violation agreements he signed with both the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency. In the book, Snowden explains how he viewed himself as a whistleblower by revealing details about the government’s mass collection of emails,...

According to a new declassified ruling from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), FBI personnel systematically abused National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance data in both 2017 and 2018. The 138-page ruling, which dates back to October 2018, was only unsealed 12 months later in October 2019. It offers a rare look at how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been abusing the constitutional privacy rights of U.S. citizens with alarming regularity. The court ruling is also a stinging rebuke to the FBI’s overreach of its ability to search surveillance intelligence databases. Key elements of the FISA court...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House says President Barack Obama has invited House Democratic leaders to dinner Wednesday at a hotel near the White House. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California will attend the private dinner, along with the No. 2 and No. 3 Democrats in the House, congressmen Steny Hoyer of Maryland and James Clyburn of South Carolina. The top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, Maryland's Chris Van Hollen, will be there, plus the chair of the House Democrat's campaign arm, Steve Israel of New York.

The general leading the force to free the captive enemy from the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, and inflict a humiliating defeat on the United States is so-called “civil rights” and “Constitutional” attorney Michael Ratner. It was Ratner who led the way in recruiting elite lawyers to defend the enemy combatants being interrogated at Gitmo. But Ratner is a long-time leader of two pro-Communist and anti-American organizations who have for decades lent aid and comfort to America's enemies in the Cold War and beyond. Michael Ratner began his legal career in the late 1960s at the National Lawyers Guild,...

National security insiders are trying to claim treason for the fact that President Donald Trump’s transition team discussed potentially setting up a phone call with the Russian ambassador to the United States.Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin have met publicly on several occasions, and Russia maintains an active embassy in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.The Hill reported: Former national security adviser Michael Flynn spoke with a “senior official” in President Trump’s transition team at the Mar-a-Lago resort to discuss what he should communicate to the Russian ambassador in a highly-scrutinized series of phone calls in December of 2016,...