Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan, said Thursday morning that he’s hopeful that Edward Snowden can return to the U.S. and get the death penalty for revealing secrets about the U.S. domestic surveillance program.
Pompeo said on C-SPAN that “the traitor Edward Snowden,” a former National Security Agency contractor, put people’s lives at risk by divulging secrets about U.S. intelligence gathering.
“He should be brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence,” he said.
“Having put friends of mine, friends of yours who serve in the military today an enormous risk because of the information he stole and then released to foreign powers,” Pompeo added.
Snowden’s revelations forced him to flee to Russia, and sparked a debate that divided the country between people who wanted him tried as a traitor, and others who said he’s a hero for revealing the extent of government surveillance against U.S. citizens. Congress last year voted to scale back the surveillance program, largely in response to information provided by Snowden.
Pompeo made his remarks in a discussion that also touched on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private server and private email system while working in the Obama administration. The government has slowly been releasing those emails, and more than 1,300 of them have been classified, and about two dozen more have been deemed “top secret” and will not be released.
Pompeo and other Republicans have said Clinton failed to secure this information by putting it on her unsecure system.
“I can assure you, that information was a lot more secure in the hands of the secure system that the government has spent hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars setting up, rather than on a private server in the home of Hillary Clinton,” he said. “It’s not a close call. There’s a reason we have it set up that way.”
