Fifteen former staff members of the Church committee, the 1970s congressional inquiry into illegal activity by the CIA, wrote jointly to the US president 
 
 The campaign to persuade Barack Obama to allow the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to return home to the US without facing prolonged prison time has received powerful new backing from some of the most experienced intelligence experts in the country. 
 
 
 
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 Fifteen former staff members of the Church committee, the 1970s congressional investigation into illegal activity by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, have written jointly to Obama calling on him to end Snowden’s “untenable exile in Russia, which benefits nobody”. Over eight pages of tightly worded argument, they remind the president of the positive debate that Snowden’s disclosures sparked – prompting one of the few examples of truly bipartisan legislative change in recent years. 
 
 They also remind Obama of the long record of leniency that has been shown by his own and previous administrations towards those who have broken secrecy laws. They even recall how their own Church committee revealed that six US presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, were guilty of abusing secret powers. 
 
 “There is no question that Snowden broke the law. But previous cases in which others violated the same law suggest leniency. And most importantly, Snowden’s actions were not for personal benefit, but were intended to spur reform. And they did so,” the signatories write. 
 
 The Church committee, or the US Senate select committee to study government operations with respect to intelligence activities, to give it its full name, sat in 1975-76 at a time of deep public anxiety about the rogue work of federal agencies. The aftershocks of Watergate were still being felt, and Seymour Hersh had exposed in the New York Times mass illegal activities by the CIA, including routine surveillance of anti-war groups. 
 
 As the 15 staff members point out, the committee investigation led to the disclosure of jaw-dropping illegal acts including the planting of an FBI informant inside the civil rights group the NAACP, attempts to push Martin Luther King into killing himself, and Cointelpro, the vast program run secretly by the FBI to disrupt progressive organisations in the US. 
 
 The lead signatories of the Obama letter are Frederick Schwarz, who was chief counsel to the Church committee and is now at the Brennan Center for Justice, and William Green Miller, the committee’s staff director who went on to become US ambassador to Ukraine in the 1990s. Together with their fellow former staffers, they add heft to a campaign to pardon Snowden that has already attracted the support of prominent public figures including the co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak, philanthropist George Soros and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the world wide web. 
 
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 In their letter, which they have also sent to the US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, the 15 cite the former CIA director David Petraeus as an example of the kind of official leniency that has so far eluded Snowden. Petraeus violated both the law and national security by leaking confidential information to his biographer and lover, then lied about it to the FBI. 
 
 “Yet he was allowed to plead guilty to just one misdemeanor for which he received no jail time,” the letter says. The reference to Petraeus is pointed at a time when the former military commander is being actively considered by President-elect Donald Trump to become US secretary of state. 
 
 Trump gains no mention in the former staffers’ plea to Obama, but he is the elephant in the room. The letter writers state euphemistically: “As the US relationship with Russia deteriorates, the risk to all interests involved increases.” 
 
 They stop short of adding that Trump’s close ties to Russia, and his notorious flattery towards Vladimir Putin, could imperil Snowden’s current asylum in that country. ||||| Members of a committee that investigated the CIA during the Watergate era have urged President Obama to show leniency on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and strike a deal to allow him to return home. 
 
 15 former members of the 1970s Church Committee, led by its former chief counsel Frederick Schwarz Jr. and ex-staff director William Green Miller, sent an eight-page letter to the President and Attorney General Loretta Lynch arguing that Snowden’s actions were a catalyst that helped change secret service policy for the better. 
 
 “There is no question that Edward Snowden’s disclosures led to public awareness which stimulated reform. Whether or not these clear benefits to the country merit a pardon, they surely do counsel for leniency,” the letter reads. 
 
 Snowden has been living in Russia since he fled the U.S. via Hong Kong in 2013. He is charged with espionage for leaking internal NSA documents to the press and could face 30 years in jail should he return to American shores. While Obama has refused to pardon him, even in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump nominating a man who once said Snowden should be executed for head of the CIA, the Church committee group said Snowden’s disclosures have been instrumental in enacting much-needed change. 
 
 The group argued that the information he brought to the public domain resulted in reform of the Patriot Act, a change in how the NSA gathers data from foreigners, and it more broadly alerted the American people to “what intelligence agencies acting in our name had been up to.” 
 
 “When intelligence agencies operate in the dark, they often have gone too far in trampling on the legitimate rights of law-abiding Americans and damaging our reputation internationally. We saw this repeated time and time again when serving as staff members for the U.S. Senate Select Committee… that in 1975-76 conducted the most extensive bipartisan investigation of a government’s secret activities ever, in this country or elsewhere,” the letter further argued. 
 
 Of course, Snowden did break the law with his actions. 
 
 On the part, the group put forward examples of past cases around the misuse of classified documents, such as National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and CIA Directors David Petraeus and John Deutch. They argued that Snowden acted in a more selfless way than others who were shown leniency for their actions, and that this should be given due consideration. 
 
 “Snowden’s explicit intent was to raise public awareness about activities that he believed (and that all three branches of government have to varying degrees affirmed) were illegal, or overbroad, so that there could be a robust public discussion about the proper scope of government surveillance. 
 
 “Snowden did not try to mask his identity, or lie to the FBI. He knew he would pay a personal price. As he has,” the group added. 
 
 Back in September, activists and lawyers from a number of human rights organizations came together to present Obama with a case to pardon Snowden. This time around, the former Church committee group is asking for leniency since it doesn’t believe that a full pardon is a feasible outcome. It closed its message to the President with the hope that authorities can “negotiate a settlement with Edward Snowden of the charges against him that both sides can accept.” ||||| Fifteen staff members who worked on a well-known bipartisan intelligence watchdog committee wrote to President Barack Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Monday requesting the administration negotiate a plea agreement with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. 
 
 “There is no question that Edward Snowden’s disclosures led to public awareness which stimulated reform,” wrote the staffers who served on the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities — called the Church Committee, after its chairman, Idaho Sen. Frank Church. 
 
 “Whether or not these clear benefits to the country merit a pardon, they surely do counsel for leniency,” the authors continued. 
 
 Frederick, or “Fritz” Schwarz, Jr., the Church Committee’s chief counsel who now heads up policy and legal advocacy organization the Brennan Center for Justice, penned the letter alongside the committee’s staff director, William Green Miller, and 13 other co-signers. 
 
 Schwarz, who published a book last year on the allure of government secrecy called Democracy in the Dark, says he has been captivated by Snowden since the former National Security Agency contractor first made his disclosures. “I’ve known many whistleblowers starting when I was chief counsel of the Church Committee, and they’re often praise worthy … but [Snowden] seemed straightforward and genuine,” he said during a phone interview with The Intercept. 
 
 In the 1970s, the Church Committee conducted an unprecedented investigation that uncovered abuses by the intelligence community and led to reforms. Schwarz recalled, during a recorded interview with the Brennan Center’s Michael German, being involved in the first and “most comprehensive” investigation into the intelligence community, which was aimed at being “open and rigorous” — challenging senators who willfully turned a blind eye to the nation’s spies and their misdeeds. 
 
 The climate at the time, wracked with scandals like Watergate and leaks like the Pentagon Papers, “led to a pent up interest in what the secret government had been doing,” he said. 
 
 The committee uncovered the NSA’s practice of retaining copies of telegrams sent overseas, the CIA’s experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs and use of domestic surveillance, and the FBI’s widely discredited program under J. Edgar Hoover, called COINTELPRO, involving the monitoring of constitutionally protected activities. 
 
 Yet that climate of support for reform and investigation has changed, the authors argued. “The government has all but stopped making bipartisan reforms,” they wrote, arguing that this has left whistleblowers to take matters into their own hands. 
 
 Snowden, who provided a massive trove of documents about the government’s worldwide surveillance regime to journalists in 2013, served as the spark to inspire lawmakers to reach across the aisle and amend the Patriot Act, ending the bulk collection metadata program in the summer of 2015, they wrote. And, his revelations uncovered the extent of overseas spying, which the Church Committee staffers note led President Obama to promise stronger privacy protections for foreigners. 
 
 If Snowden hadn’t come forward, Americans might never have known about the abuses taking place, the authors argue. “We know first hand that lack of disclosure can cause just as many, if not more, harms to the nation than disclosure,” they wrote. “When intelligence agencies operate in the dark, they often have gone too far in trampling on the legitimate rights of law-abiding Americans and damaging our reputation internationally.” 
 
 They also noted that the government has been lenient towards senior national security officials who have been involved in divulging secrets, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, who provided classified information to his biographer, with whom he was having an affair, and pled guilty to a simple misdemeanor. 
 
 Petraeus is now reportedly being considered for a role in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration. 
 
 “In all these cases, recognition of the public service the individuals had provided weighed against strict enforcement of the law, to come to a fair and just result,” the authors wrote. 
 
 Meanwhile, the harsh treatment of other whistleblowers, like Thomas Drake and Chelsea Manning, may have inspired Snowden to take the route he did, they suggest. 
 
 The authors directly challenged several assertions made by the House Intelligence Committee in a short unclassified excerpt of its investigation into Snowden’s motivations and actions, which concluded in September. The full contents of the House’s investigation remain classified, though the committee has submitted it for declassification and publication. 
 
 Notably, the former Church Committee staffers did not advocate for a pardon, something President Obama has rejected as a possibility. Instead, they urged the government to consider offering Snowden a deal. 
 
 “Under current law, the only way to weigh the public benefits of Snowden’s leaks and account for his aim to help America is for the government to mitigate the charges through settlement discussions,” they concluded. 
 
 “I felt a flat pardon as opposed to what we call for, a negotiation with leniency, was very unlikely to happen,” Schwarz explained. 
 
 When asked if the current political climate might stifle further reform, given the incoming administration and President-elect Donald Trump’s known volatility, Schwarz was diplomatic: “I think we need to be eternally watchful.”
– “Snowden did not try to mask his identity, or lie to the FBI. He knew he would pay a personal price. As he has,” 15 former staff members of the Church Committee write in an 8-page letter to President Obama. The Church Committee investigated illegal activity by intelligence agencies in the 1970s, and now its experts are asking for leniency for Edward Snowden, the Guardian reports. According to the Intercept, the group argues that Snowden, acting selflessly, "stimulated reform" through his actions. The letter writers say that without Snowden, Americans may still not know “what intelligence agencies acting in our name had been up to," TechCrunch reports. The letter gives more weight to the movement to get Snowden pardoned, though the members of the Church Committee don't go that far; they want Snowden to strike a deal with the government. “There is no question that Snowden broke the law," they write. "But previous cases in which others violated the same law suggest leniency." They point to former CIA director David Petraeus, currently being considered by Donald Trump for secretary of State. He leaked confidential information in violation of national security but received no jail time after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor. In contrast, Snowden is facing a sentence of 30 years if he returns to the US from Russia, where he has been living in exile.