Gabbard’s dodges on whether she supports a pardon for Snowden exacerbate questions about her confirmation chances

In 2020, then-Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard introduced legislation calling on the federal government to drop all charges against Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who in 2013 revealed the existence of the bulk collection of American phone records by the NSA before fleeing to Russia.

In 2020, then-Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard introduced legislation calling on the federal government to drop all charges against Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who in 2013 revealed the existence of the bulk collection of American phone records by the NSA before fleeing to Russia. On Thursday, she refused under persistent questioning by Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee to say whether she now believed Snowden’s actions were traitorous. Gabbard’s repeated dodges during her nomination hearing to become President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence may have further imperiled a nomination that already appeared to be on a knife’s edge. “Was he a traitor at the time when he took America’s secrets, released them in public and then ran to China and became a Russian citizen?” asked Republican Sen. James Lankford in a lengthy line of questioning that described the broad sense of the intelligence community that Snowden’s actions were tantamount to treason. “I’m focused on the future and how we can prevent something like this from happening again,” Gabbard said. She sought to lay out reforms she would undertake to prevent future leaks on the scale of Snowden’s, including “making sure that every single person in the workforce knows about the legal whistleblower channels available to them.” At other moments, she gave the same answer almost verbatim, an answer that suggests she still sees value in his actions: “Edward Snowden broke the law,” she said. But, she said, “He also, even as he broke the law, released information that exposed egregious, illegal and unconstitutional programs that are happening within our government that led to serious reforms.”