President-elect Donald Trump nearly granted a pardon in 2021 to Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor responsible for the largest leak of top-secret information about U.S. surveillance programs in the nation’s history.

“I decided to let that one ride, let the courts work it out,” Trump said 10 months after leaving office, when asked about pardons for Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “I was very close to going the other way.”

But advocates for clemency for Snowden, including several of Trump’s picks for top Cabinet posts, are hopeful that Trump is now closer to pardoning the former spy, who has been living in Moscow for more than a decade to avoid a 2013 Justice Department indictment.

Matt Gaetz, the former congressman who withdrew last month as Trump’s nominee for attorney general, said the Snowden pardon has been a topic of discussion among people working on Trump’s presidential transition since the election, though he said he had not spoken about it with Trump during that time. Gaetz is hopeful that the future president will deliver.

“I advocated for a pardon for Mr. Snowden extensively. That did not give Mr. Trump any apprehension in his nominating me. I would have recommended that as attorney general,” Gaetz said Monday. “I have discussed the matter with others in and around the transition, and there seemed to be pretty broad support for a pardon.”

Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary pick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., campaigned for president on the promise of a “day one” pardon of Snowden and building a Washington monument in his honor. Director of National Intelligence pick Tulsi Gabbard sponsored a 2020 House resolution with Gaetz calling for the government to drop charges against Snowden.

Even Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, has recently advocated for clemency for Snowden and other whistleblowers and leakers from the national security apparatus, including Jack Teixeira, a former Air National Guard member who was sentenced last month to 15 years in prison for releasing top-secret information including details of U.S. military assistance for Ukraine.

“My views have changed. I think 100 percent you have to let them go,” the younger Trump said in May during a podcast appearance. “You need those kind of things to keep us in check. It would be different if I thought we were functioning as good actors, but we’re not.”

A person familiar with the thinking of Vice President-elect JD Vance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak without authorization, said he has not expressed strong feelings one way or another on a Snowden pardon.

“He exposed a lot of the abuses of the U.S. security state that Trump himself complained about and experienced,” said Glenn Greenwald, a former journalist for the Guardian who received Snowden’s leaked documents and has advocated for his pardon.

“And if Trump’s goal is to bring transparency to those agencies there is no one who has done that more bravely and honestly than Snowden.”

Snowden has lived in Moscow since 2012, when U.S. authorities revoked his passport as he tried to flee to Ecuador from Hong Kong.

He now lives there with his American wife and two children, both under the age of 4, according to Ben Wizner, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented Snowden. Snowden has said he released the classified information as a whistleblower seeking to expose “abuses” by the government, including the collection of data on U.S. citizens.

“Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year, consistently, by orders of magnitude,” Snowden said in previous remarks.

Snowden declined to comment for this story through Wizner. A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

A 2016 report from the House Intelligence Committee concluded that Snowden caused “tremendous damage to national security,” though the details of the damage was redacted from the unclassified version of the report.

“The full scope of the damage inflicted by Snowden remains unknown,” the report said. “Nevertheless, even by a conservative estimate, the U.S. Government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and will eventually spend billions, to attempt to mitigate the damage Snowden caused.”

The report described continued uncertainty over exactly what Snowden shared from two classified networks where he collected documents for release. The House committee found he removed more than 1.5 million classified documents, enough to stack “more than three miles high” if printed out.

The Washington Post and the U.S. arm of the Guardian newspaper won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their reporting on a fraction of the documents. Among the revelations were details about how U.S. spies accessed and mined the data of internet firms, the classified budget of the U.S. intelligence community and a secret National Security Agency program to collect the telephone record of millions of U.S. citizens, a program whose existence had been previously denied by the then-Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. in testimony before the U.S. Senate.

“No sir. Not wittingly,” Clapper had said under oath in response to a question about whether the U.S. collected data on millions of Americans. After the Snowden disclosures, Clapper admitted that his answer had been “clearly erroneous.” Then-President Barack Obama said Clapper “should have been more careful about how he responded.”

Two years after the Snowden disclosures, Congress passed and Obama signed the USA Freedom Act, which ended the bulk collection of phone records and increased transparency of the classified courts that authorize secret surveillance programs.

Continued calls for Snowden’s pardon reflect “a lack of understanding of who we are and it reflects a lack of respect for what we do,” Sue Gordon, the former principal deputy director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, said last month on CBS News’ Face the Nation.

“He harmed America. He not only harmed intelligence, he harmed our allies and partners and he harmed our businesses,” she added. “ … There is nothing justifiable about what he has done.”

Tucker Carlson, a prominent podcaster and Trump supporter who has been at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort during the transition, has described having dinner with Snowden in Moscow during a February trip to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin. Carlson said Snowden declined his offer of an interview or other public support.

“I tried to convince him: I would love to do an interview, shoot it on my iPhone. I would love to take a picture together and put it on the internet, because I just wanted to show support because I think he’s been railroaded,” Carlson said in a podcast interview. Greenwald, Gaetz and U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) pushed Trump at the end of his first term in office to grant Snowden a pardon, a path the president-elect said he considered.

“I will say you have people on both sides of that issue, good people on both sides. And you have some bad people on one side,” Trump told the conservative podcaster Candace Owens in December 2021. “There were some spying things and there were some bad things released that really set us back and really hurt us.”

Assange pleaded guilty in July to a federal charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose national defense information. The deal allowed him to be released from detention in Britain to return to Australia, his native country.

After Trump declined to offer a pardon to Snowden in 2021, Snowden lashed out on the social network then known as Twitter.

“I am not at all disappointed to go unpardoned by a man who has never known a love he had not paid for,” Snowden wrote in a post about Trump that has since been deleted. “But what supporters of his remain must never forgive that this simpering creature failed to pardon truth-tellers in far more desperate circumstances.”

Wizner, Snowden’s attorney, said the lesson of the social media post was simple: “Never Tweet.”

“Snowden’s actions served the public interest and led to historic reforms in all three branches of government,” Wizner added in a statement. “He acted from love of country and should not spend his life in exile.”