Article from The Washington Examiner by Steven Nelson.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., defended former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and appeared to obliquely rebuke a legal opinion written by Brett Kavanaugh hours before meeting the Supreme Court nominee.

The Kentucky Republican, a swing vote whose opposition could block Kavanaugh, was not pressed for his views on the nomination during a Tuesday event hosted by the Fund for American Studies. But one student asked about Snowden, who exposed the NSA’s bulk collection of domestic call records – a program at the heart of Paul’s unease with Kavanaugh.

“He didn’t sell secrets to the Russians, he wasn’t a traitor. He revealed something that revealed the highest ranking member of our intelligence community lied. I think he did it as a whistle-blower, he was reporting malfeasance,” Paul said.

Paul, who previously joked about Snowden sharing a prison cell with former intelligence director James Clapper, whose inaccurate testimony Snowden exposed, doubled down after polling students, finding a similar number viewed Snowden as a traitor and a whistleblower.

Read the entire article at The Washington Examiner.

Image Credit: By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Rand Paul) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons