Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi
Gabbard has again urged President Donald Trump to grant pardon to whistleblower
Edward Snowden and Wikileaks-Co-founder Julian Assange, New York Post reported
on Friday.

The former presidential
candidate appealed to Trump in a tweet to drop charges against the two whistleblowers,
citing the “personal sacrifice” they made in “exposing the deception”.

“@realDonaldTrump, since you’re giving pardons to
people, please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice,
exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state,” Gabbard
tweeted, linking a video she had posted on the same issue on October 6.

The appeal came in the wake of Trump’s full pardon on Wednesday of his
first National Security Advisor (NSA) Michael Flynn, who was charged with
discussing diplomacy with a Russian diplomat by the FBI in 2017.  

Snowden, a former NSA contractor, is wanted in the US for leaking a
trove of NSA data in 2013, which exposed the agency’s mass surveillance programme on US citizens. After leaking the documents to Guardian newspaper, he fled to
Hong Kong and from there to Russia, where he is holing up till date.

Meanwhile, Assange was arrested by London authorities in April this year after
taking refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in the country for seven years. He is
wanted in the US for publishing millions of documents in 2010 on country’s war
crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of which received from US army personnel
Chelsea Manning.

Manning served a seven-year sentence under the Espionage Act from 2010
to January 2017, when her rest of the sentence was commuted by President Barack
Obama.