Julian Assange and Edward Snowden: Why No Pardons

I wanna ask you, uh, in terms of talking about this corruption

by the way, name

that comes to mind in the news recently is Julian, Julian Assange.

You know, he was exposing this corruption early on.

Yeah.

He's had his life ruined because of it. It's, it's a really sad story.

Edward Snowden, I mean, think about that bravery.

For me, I was quite young when that was going on.

But I mean, the idea of saying, "Hey, whistleblowing.

Actually-

Yeah

... we've got some corruption going on.

They're not being honest with the American people."

You could have had a chance to pardon these individuals. What was...

Why-

Yeah

... why, why decide not to in that moment?

So you have two sides of it.

Yeah.

In one case you have, like, sort of a spy deal going on,

and in another case you

have somebody that's exposing real corruption.

Right.

Uh, I feel a little bit... I won't say which one,

but I feel a little bit more

strongly about one than the other.

Right.

Uh, but and you probably understand that.

Mm-hmm.

But, uh,

I could have done it, but I will say you have people on both

sides of that issue,

good people on both sides, and you have some bad people on one side.

Uh, but I decided to let that one ride, let the courts work it out.