Newsweek – Edward Jay Epstein, January 7, 2017: “A president can pardon anyone from any crime for any reason, or no reason at all, but, as the hours tick away on his presidency, it is unimaginable that Obama, a former law lecturer, will ignore all he knows about what Snowden did and absolve him of his crimes. This may surprise many people, in part because most of what they know about this case came from the mouth (and tweets) of a single source, Edward Snowden. Here is the sanitized version of his story: On May 20, 2013, just over month after he began working at the NSA Cryptologic Center in Hawaii, he failed to show up for work. He called in sick—but he wasn’t sick, he was running. He had flown to Hong Kong with a massive cache of stolen secrets. While in Hong Kong, he gave a very small portion of these documents to three handpicked journalists: Laura Poitras, a Berlin-based documentary filmmaker, Glenn Greenwald, a Brazil-based blogger, and Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The Washington Post. The exposes these journalists produced, based on those documents, dominated the headlines for weeks. As the world reeled, Snowden vanished again, this time for 13 days, from June 11 to June 23, before turning up in Russia, which gave him sanctuary, protection and a global platform for his campaign to expose further NSA secrets, and which offered to protect him from prosecution for his crimes…”