Letter to the Editor: Reality Winner deserves Americas pardon before Snowden – The Delaware County Daily Times

To the Times:

I was stunned on Wednesday to see a Los Angeles Daily News editorial reprinted in the local Daily Times. I wasnt surprised by the occasional reprint of an editorial from another newspaper that alarmed me. Not at all. It is refreshing to read quality viewpoints from newsprint sources outside our region, or from anywhere on the planet. My shock was the subject matter and the full page headline that introduced it.

As noted in the editorial, Edward Snowden is a former Booz Allen employee subcontracted to the NSA, the National Security Agency, who leaked classified documents, lots of them, to the news media in 2013. He eventually ran off to Russia for political asylum to avoid trial in an American courtroom. He lives in Russia by his own choosing and not in a prison cell where Ms. Reality Winner, another NSA subcontractor and recipient of an Air Force Commendation Medal, has spent the last two years. More about Ms. Winner below.

The earnest and numerous crush of articles, essays, YouTube monologues, talk radio rants, all imploring a Trump pardon for Snowden, are part of a recent snowball campaign by conservative organizations feeding off of Trumps inside hints that he would add Snowden to his unending list of bogus pardons. A gamblers sure bet for Snowden-backers is to get the pardon before Nov. 3. Lame duck presidents can barely float in the tainted pond that is Washington politics.

For me the incredibility of the editorial championing Snowdens total forgiveness is that a more deserving person sits in a federal prison and will stay there until her excessive five year and three- days sentence (longest sentence ever under the Espionage Act) is completed, no matter how well-behaved or repentant she made be. In a more just time, Ms. Winners crime compared to Snowdens crime, would have made her eligible for a patriots medal of service to her country.

In May 2017, she printed a document showing how Russian intelligence hacked a U.S. voting software supplier and attempted to breach more than 100 election systems in the days before the Nov. 6, 2016 election. The importance here is that the document was shared in August 2017 well after the United States and the world had accepted as fact that the Russian government interfered with the U.S. election. What was missing was the newly elected presidents and the GOP congressional legislators refusal to believe what everyone else knew was fact. Reality Winner, an intelligence specialist found proof that Russian interference occurred and was being hidden from the nation. She shared it with a news outlet and was punished severely by those who continued to deny the evidence.

Who should be pardoned? Justice and decency supports Reality Winner.

Robert N. McLaughlin, Ridley Park

Originally posted here:
Letter to the Editor: Reality Winner deserves Americas pardon before Snowden - The Delaware County Daily Times