United States President Barack Obama insists his government isn’t in the business of domestic surveillance, but one of his former advisers says that’s contrary to the truth.
"Everybody knows I love this president, but this is
ridiculous," former-Special Adviser for Green Jobs Van Jones
said Wednesday on CNN. "First of all, we do have a domestic
spying program, and what we need to be able to do is figure out
how to balance these things, not pretend like there’s no
balancing to be done.”
The remark made by Jones, who currently serves as a senior fellow
at the Center for American Progress, directly contrasts with
comments Obama made earlier in the week to late night talk show
host Jay Leno.
“We don’t have a domestic spying program,” Obama told Leno
during a Tuesday night interview. "What we do have are some
mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address
that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat."
Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper, Jones jabbed the president’s
remarks while also assaulting the commander-in-chief’s record
with regards to charging intelligence leakers like Bradley
Manning and Edward Snowden with espionage.
Despite campaigning on a platform of utmost transparency, Obama
and his administration have so far charged more leakers with
espionage than all previous presidents combined twice over.
Speaking to CNN, Jones challenged the president’s past behavior
towards whistleblowers and suggested that Snowden, the
30-year-old leaker of classified National Security Agency
documents, stands little chance of a fair trial in America.
“But much more important, he said something else that I thought
that was really awful,” Jones continued. He said that if
somebody like Snowden wanted to be a whistleblower, they could
have gone ahead.
“Well, hold on a second, sir. That is — you are right now
prosecuting more whistleblowers – not only than any American
president, than every American president combined! So you can’t
then come out on Leno and yuck it up and say, 'Well,
whistleblowers, come on out and we’ll treat you right.' because
you haven’t been doing that.”
Last week, Russia approved Snowden’s request for asylum by
allowing him a one-year stay overseas as charges of spying loom
stateside. Meanwhile, days earlier a military judge convicted
Army Private First Class Bradley Manning with multiple counts of
espionage for his role in sharing classified material with the
anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. Manning’s court-martial is
currently in its sentencing phase and could end with Col. Denise
Lind sending him to prison for a maximum of 90 years.