Trump Says He Will 'Take A Look' At Pardoning Edward Snowden

"I'm going to take a look at that very strongly," Trump said during a press briefing Saturday.

Trump said the issue split his staff: "Many people think he should be somehow treated differently, and other people think he did very bad things."

The president's willingness to even consider a pardon leagues away from his hardline stance on the issue in 2013 before he was president, when he tweeted Snowden was a "traitor" and a "spy who should be executed."

Snowden himself weighed in, saying, "the last time we heard a White House considering a pardon was 2016, when the very same Attorney General who once charged me conceded that, on balance, my work in exposing the NSA's unconstitutional system of mass surveillance had been 'a public service.'"

I'm a San Francisco-based reporter covering breaking news at Forbes. I've previously reported for USA Today, Business Insider, The San Francisco Business Times and San

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