AP Exclusive: Barr 'vehemently opposed' to pardoning Snowden

The Justice Departments criminal complaint against him was dated just days after Snowdens name first surfaced as the person who had leaked to the news media that the NSA, in classified surveillance programs, gathered telephone and Internet records to ferret out potential terror plots.

It was unclear how serious Trump was, particularly given that years earlier he had denounced Snowden as a spy deserving of execution.

Any effort to pardon Snowden would unquestionably infuriate senior intelligence officials, who say his disclosures caused extraordinary damage and will have repercussions for years to come.

In a memoir published last year, Snowden wrote that his seven years working for the NSA and CIA led him to conclude that the U.S.

Bushs, would ever hold the IC legally responsible for anything, he wrote, using an abbreviation for the intelligence community.