The petition did not help: the United States is not going to have mercy on Snowden

Two years ago, in the summer of 2013, a petition appeared on the Whitehouse.gov website calling for pardon of Edward Snowden, known for exposing the all-pervasive work of American intelligence agencies. As a former employee of these same services, he is accused of treason and the distribution of classified documents.

Although the scandal that erupted after that sounded quite loud in the media, it did not seem to lead to real changes. The NSA, as it listened to mass communication, continues to do so, and not a single president or head of a three-letter agency was injured in the proceedings.

The petition quickly gained 100 thousand sympathetic votes, and, as promised by the White House, got into official consideration. True, the US government did not promise a specific timeline for the consideration of petitions, and an official response to it came only yesterday, two years later .

As expected, no one is going to have mercy on the traitor to Snowden's homeland. Snowden himself noted that he agrees to return to the United States if a fair trial awaits him there - but, as knowledgeable people say in the  comments on the news , according to the current law, he will not be able to justify his actions by discovering the illegal behavior of the agency in which he worked. And since he does not deny that he distributed the documents, the result of the trial is predetermined in advance.

In response to the petition, Lisa Monaco, US Presidential Adviser on State Security and Anti-Terrorism, in particular, writes:

Instead of taking constructive measures in connection with the problems he discovered, his [Snowden] decision, expressed in the theft and publication of classified information, entailed grave consequences for the security of our country and the people working on this security.
If it seemed to him that his actions were civil disobedience, he needed to follow the example of others and fight against these measures, talk about his doubts, hold constructive protests, and accept the consequences of his actions.
He needs to return home and stand trial by jury, and not hide under the protection of an authoritarian regime. Now he simply escaped from the consequences of his actions.

One of his lawyers, Ben Wisner, argues that under the espionage law of 1917, which accuses Snowden, there is no difference between passing documents to the press in the public interest and selling them to a foreign enemy. And the fact that information about the mass wiretap did not need to be kept secret from the public at all will not help him in court.

In the summer of the same year, 2013, Snowden was granted asylum in Russia, which the United States cannot pressure hard enough to extradite him. In July 2014, his long-time girlfriend Lindsey Mills moved to Edward from Hawaii, and since then they have been living together in Snowden’s Moscow apartment. And in March 2015 he expressed a desire to leave Russia and move to Switzerland. Perhaps he changed his mind after this particular country recently meekly allowed the United States to arrest on its territory and transport the defendants in the high-profile corruption case to FIFA.

Snowden's other lawyer, Jesseline Radack, clarified that her client was not hiding from justice at all and did not run away from him. According to her, the problem is that Snowden’s passport was revoked at a time when he was in transit in Russia, leaving for Latin America.