According to one report, So far, with more than 1.3 million people voting, 79% say ‘yes’, 21% ‘no’.
Elon Musk Polls Twitter On Whether Julian Assange and Edward Snowden Should Be Pardoned
"Adding to a trend of polling Twitter on significant issues, Elon Musk is asking users to opine on whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden should be pardoned.
Both Assange and Snowden are facing serious charges in the United States but are regarded by their supporters as critical whistleblowers of national security secrets.
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“I am not expressing an opinion, but did promise to conduct this poll. Should Assange and Snowden be pardoned?” Musk asked in a tweet on Saturday evening. More than 14 hours into the 24-hour poll, with more than 2.6 million responses, a little more than 80 percent of users chose “yes.”
Assange, a 51-year-old from Australia, is best known for his leadership of WikiLeaks, a group that has given a platform for whistleblowers to release sensitive documents. That includes publishing documents stolen from Democrats during the 2016 election cycle.
Assange was arrested in 2019 outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after a years-long asylum was revoked. He was sentenced to 50 months in prison for skipping bail in 2012 when he faced possible extradition to Sweden in sex crimes investigations that have since been dropped.
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This year, Assange has been fighting extradition to the United States to stand trial on charges stemming from the publication of classified documents more than a decade ago. A group of news outlets, including The New York Times, criticized the U.S. government in a letter last week, saying that indicting Assange under the Espionage Act “sets a dangerous precedent” that jeopardizes national security reporting. Their letter did not voice support for federal prosecutors to drop the part of the case related to accusations of a hacking-related conspiracy, though it did note “some of us are concerned” about it.
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Snowden, 39, has been charged by the Justice Department with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and one charge of stealing the property of the U.S. federal government after he left his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii in 2013. He then flew out of the country and leaked classified information, including documents about domestic surveillance programs.
Snowden has been living in exile in Russia for years, and on Friday, his lawyer said Snowden had sworn an oath of allegiance to Russia and received a Russian passport.
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Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who completed a $44 billion takeover of Twitter earlier this year, held a poll last month on the social media platform asking users if former President Donald Trump should be reinstated. Trump was banned after the Capitol riot in January 2021. After a slim majority voted in Trump’s favor, the former president’s account was reinstated, though Trump has yet to tweet anything since then."
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'Should Assange and Snowden be pardoned?': Twitter CEO Elon Musk launches another poll
Twitter's new owner and CEO Elon Musk on Sunday launched another poll to know whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Edward Snowden should be pardoned. "I am not expressing an opinion, but did promise to conduct this poll. Should Assange and Snowden be pardoned?" he asked in a tweet on Sunday. This is his third such poll. . . READ MORE
Musk launches poll on Snowden and Assange
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Elon Musk posted a Twitter poll on Saturday on whether former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange should be pardoned. Preliminary results show overwhelming public support for letting the two, who both face charges under the Espionage Act, off the hook.
“I am not expressing an opinion, but did promise to conduct this poll,” Musk tweeted, asking users: “Should Assange and Snowden be pardoned?”
So far, with more than 1.3 million people voting, 79% say ‘yes’, 21% ‘no’.
In 2013, Snowden leaked a massive trove of classified documents revealing the US National Security Agency’s sprawling surveillance operations which targeted civilians in America. The whistleblower subsequently fled the US to Hong Kong, and then to Russia, where he recently received a Russian passport, according to his lawyer.
In the US, he faces three charges under the Espionage Act which could carry a prison sentence of 30 years. He could also be accused of other crimes, potentially making the punishment even more severe.
Julian Assange entered the crosshairs of the US government in 2010, when WikiLeaks published classified documents revealing alleged war crimes committed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Australian-born publisher, who is now locked up in Belmarsh Prison in the UK, is facing extradition to the US – where he faces espionage charges that carry a prison sentence of up to 175 years.
Musk, who recently competed a $44 billion deal to take over Twitter, has on several occasions asked users whether the platform should unblock certain accounts. In November, he posted a poll on whether Twitter should unban former US President Donald Trump, who was permanently suspended in early 2021 for allegedly inciting violence amid the Capitol Hill riots. A clear majority voted in favor of reinstating Trump’s account.
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Every year at this time, presidents issue pardons, and some of the most controversial pardons have been issued when they are leaving office.
For example, President Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive from justice who was facing 51 counts of tax fraud and was alleged to have owed $48 million to the IRS. Rich’s former wife, who urged Clinton to issue this pardon, was a substantial contributor to the Clinton Library and to Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign.
Clinton also pardoned Susan McDougal for her role in the Whitewater scandal, and commuted the sentences of 15 members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Puertorriqueno, a Puerto Rican terrorist organization that set off 120 bombs in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. It was rumored that this was also done to help Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign.
As he was leaving office, President Barack Obama granted clemency to Chelsea Manning, who, as discussed below, did incalculable damage to the nation by providing highly classified information to Wikileaks, at the request of Julian Assange.
Obama also commuted the sentence of Oscar Lopez Rivera, another Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Puertorriqueno member who had refused to accept clemency from Clinton in 1999 because it was conditioned on his renunciation of the use or threat of violence to achieve the that organization’s political objectives. Obama imposed no such condition on Rivera in 2017
This year, there are some who are urging President Donald Trump to issue a pardon to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Among the people supporting a pardon for Assange are the usual array of Hollywood celebrities and liberal activists—Oliver Stone, Pamela Anderson, Michael Moore, Daniel Ellsburg, Noam Chomsky, among others—and Edward Snowden.
Actually, the fact that Snowden, who leaked highly classified material from the National Security Agency in 2013 and subsequently fled to Russia (with, according to the government, the assistance of Assange and others at WikiLeaks), is supporting a pardon for Assange tells you just about everything you need to know.
Assange is an enemy of the United States who, among other things, deliberately recruited an American soldier to illegally disclose national security secrets and who then released those secrets to the public. Assange is also the creator and manager of a website—Wikileaks—dedicated to repeating this crime over and over again.
A formal government review of Assange’s actions and of their consequences found the following:
- Multiple lives were lost and others were put at risk.
- U.S. diplomatic relations were severely harmed.
- Foreign militaries changed their tactics and procedures—making them more difficult to predict and counter.
- Key intelligence sources and methods were lost or disrupted.
- Tens of millions of taxpayer funds were wasted responding to or mitigating the threat posed by these illegal disclosures.
Recall that in April 2019, the United States Department of Justice issued a press release announcing the indictment (which was superseded in June, accompanied by a new press release) against Assange, and indicating their intent to seek his extradition so that he would have to answer for the charges.
As we wrote here, the charge relates to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.” Unlike other journalists, Assange was not simply a passive recipient of classified information that was obtained by some would-be government whistleblower. Assange, a self-proclaimed “famous teenage hacker in Australia,” has a long history of actively encouraging and recruiting individuals to hack into non-public systems to obtain sensitive classified information, often telling those individuals how to exploit system vulnerabilities and providing those individuals with a list of targets.
Assange was not subtle about this, publishing a “Most Wanted Leaks” list on the WikiLeaks website, something no legitimate journalist would do. Unfortunately, many, including Chelsea Manning, responded.
According to the superseding indictment, Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Manning, “a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government network used for classified documents and communications.”
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