Or have their cars randomly accelerate out of control.
Not to mention there are plenty of journalists that have covered and exposed worse things about the intelligence community that are just fine.
Heck Clinton's bad humor aside Assange is still alive, so is Snowden do you really think they are both out of reach of the US military or any of it's TLA's?
You really think that it's that hard to put a bullet in Assange's head anytime he peaks out of a window at the embassy? Heck I'm surprised an enemy state willing to cause the US irreversible political and PR damage didn't do it as a false flag yet.
Most notably, President Ford pardoned President Nixon for basically anything he might have done as opposed to specific charges.
Slate Article on the Subject: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
Interview: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-interview-...
Preemptive of any investigation/indictment/etc. Not, as I understand it, in advance of the illegal action itself. (Not a distinction relevant here, of course, just clarifying)
The only constitutional restrictions on presidential pardon are
1) He can only pardon crimes against the federal government. That means a presidential pardon won't get you out of a state rap, and it also means he can't use the pardon to affect civil cases.
2) His pardons can't affect impeachment cases. Most notably, he can't pardon himself to avoid impeachment.
Most legal scholars say the president also probably couldn't get away with issuing pardons for acts that haven't occurred yet, since that amounts to a change in the law and encroaches on Congress's powers.
As others have alluded to, it wouldn't necessarily preclude illegal actions, though it could certainly change the optics on them.
Besides, if your accusation is correct (that they are so mindless and stupid as a group that their reaction to a controversial presidential pardon would be to go after the political party associated with that president), then the US should just fire every single last one of them and start from scratch. Seriously. If that's where things are at, then they're all negative contributors anyway. But I don't think it's that bad, I've got more faith in humanity than you do apparently (for the time being at least :( ).
[citation needed]. I've never heard anyone from the intel community say anything other than that they need more domestic surveillance powers and that we should shut up and stop complaining about the ones in place already.
The intelligence community that created these illegal programs will be held responsible for their crimes against America.
Obama should do The Right Thing and screw the intelligence community - what have they done for him in 8 years anyway? Started bad wars and lied under oath.
After all, Snowden gave up his right to autonomy in 2013. His life now is entirely within the hands of history.
It would also antagonize a lot of countries and almost mechanically create domestic pressure for foreign leaders to take a stand against the US. There is literally no better way to make non-alignment a popular political stance. Not only that, but the second gulf war has already harmed the credibility of the international order that the US and its allies have worked hard to instaurate. The US did not ratify the ICC, ignores UN war laws, operates an alternative detention facility to escape its own domestic civil rights protections, performs extrajudicial killings all around the ME and now take down political opponents abroad. That could very well be the straw that breaks the camel's back. And if it isn't, what comes next should. Not taking a moral stance on either of the things mentioned above, just observing that the increasing dissonance between official US narrative on foreign policy, and its real-world applications can only harm its prestige and credibility.
I can't think of a more terrible move for the USG than murdering Snowden.
tl;dr: The harm has been done already, killing him would only make things worse.
I'm sure it can get even weirder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...
Putin might be mad, but they wouldn't give 2 fucks about Snowden, if Russia got anything in return for granting him asylum they already got it.
That said the US would more likely want to exfiltrate him for this specific reason, they would want to know if and what did Snowden handed over to Russian intelligence.