Bradley Birkenfeld, who exposed one of the largest tax scams in U.S. history, should also be pardoned
On February 20, 2025, Donald Trump created the new position of the “Pardon Czar” to recommend “executive clemency” candidates, naming Alice Marie Johnson to that role.
Johnson had been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for non-violent drug offenses in Memphis, Tennessee, but received a sentence commutation and later a full pardon in Trump’s first term, after Kim Kardashian intervened on her behalf.
So far during his second term, Trump has used the executive’s pardon power, predictably, for partisan purposes—pardoning some 1,500 people associated with the January 6 Capitol riot attack, for example, and 24 anti-abortion protesters who were convicted after blockading a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic.[1]
Trump has also pardoned, disproportionately, well-connected, wealthy people accused of white-collar crimes, which The New York Times described as part of an effort of “relegating white-collar offenses”—which Trump has himself widely committed[2]—to a “rank of secondary importance.”
Despite purporting to ratchet up the War on Drugs, Trump has additionally pardoned corrupt sheriffs and high-level drug kingpins, including former Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández.[3]
CovertAction Magazine is spearheading a campaign to obtain pardons for people who genuinely deserve one, notably national security whistleblowers Edward Snowden, Daniel Hale and John Kiriakou. Additionally, we are supporting a pardon for whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld, who exposed fraud being carried out by Swiss banks and saved U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars.
Below is some basic background on each of the four and a summary of why each deserves a pardon. The pardon is important not only for symbolic reasons and to restore the aforementioned whistleblowers’ public reputations, but also to ensure that they are eligible for government pensions, choice jobs and that, in Edward Snowden’s case, he be allowed to return to live in the U.S. freely.
Edward Snowden:
At one point Donald Trump said he would consider a pardon for Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) staffer whom Trump also once called a “terrible traitor and threat” and “spy who should be executed”—a view shared by former CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Snowden leaked thousands of classified NSA documents in 2013 that exposed illegal spying on U.S. citizens and countries worldwide under a data collection program known as Prism. Another program that he exposed, XkeyScore, helped to advance the Bush and Obama administrations’ drone assassination program, a program which disturbed Snowden.
Warning of an ascendant techno-totalitarian surveillance state, Snowden was indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act of 1917, which was used to quash anti-war activism during World War I. After having his passport revoked at the time he was in transit in Russia, he has been forced to live in exile in Russia (he can’t leave Russia without a valid passport)—if he returns to the U.S., he faces upwards of 30 years in prison.
In his book, Permanent Record, Snowden said that he was motivated to leak the documents after hearing Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper lie before Congress about the NSA illegally collecting data on Americans. Then and there, he said that he realized he would be morally compromised if he did not risk everything to expose the truth.[4]
Snowden told a German reporter: “There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that, for me, really meant for me there was no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this.”
Daniel Hale:
In July 2021, Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison for violating the Espionage Act after he leaked classified documents to The Intercept, which published a series of articles based on them. The documents pointed to the existence of hit-lists and “baseball cards” of terrorists and a watchlist of 1.2 million people, half of whom were not connected to any known terrorist group. Nine out of every 10 people killed in drone strikes were also shown to be civilians.
Hale had been a drone pilot who logged more than 1,500 hours of virtual combat. He told The Intercept that he provided the documents because he believed the public had “a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill-lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelon of the U.S. government.” Hale further stated that “this outrageous explosion of watch-listing—of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice on a worldwide battlefield—it was from the very first instance, wrong.”
In an August 2021 letter to then-President Joe Biden requesting a pardon for Hale, Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) wrote that Hale shined a “vital light on the legal and moral problems of the drone program and informed the public debate on an issue that has for too many years remained in the shadows.” John Ivy, Hale’s Air Force roommate, described Hale as “a kind and caring person who promised his life in defense of this nation and its values. The people conducting secret illegal killings in other countries are criminals. Standing up for human rights makes Daniel a hero.”
John Kiriakou:
CovertAction Magazine board member John Kiriakou is another hero for helping to expose the CIA’s illegal torture program. In October 2012, Kiriakou pleaded guilty to leaking classified information identifying a covert agent in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and served 30 months in a prison in Pennsylvania.
From 1990 to 2004, Kiriakou served as a CIA officer, during which time he led an operation that resulted in the capture of al-Qaeda financier Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to waterboarding—or simulated drowning—more than 83 times during interrogation. Prosecutors said that, in 2008, Kiriakou leaked the name of a covert operative to a journalist, who subsequently disclosed it to a researcher working for the lawyer of a Guantánamo detainee.
When asked why he decided to leak the name, Kiriakou told the BBC: “My case was not about leaking—my case was about torture…this is a case about civil liberties and human rights. Somebody needs to take a stand. I am very proud to have had a role in that.”
Later, Kiriakou said that the time he spent in prison was “worth every day because revelations about the CIA’s use of torture led to Congress’s enactment of a specific ban on waterboarding and other techniques used at the black sites.”[5]
Bradley Birkenfeld:
In 2010, Birkenfeld was convicted on fraud charges and thereafter served two years in federal prison in Pennsylvania. Following his release, he was granted whistleblower status for having exposed one of the largest tax frauds in U.S. history perpetrated by the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), the largest Swiss banking institution and private bank in the world.
The UBS scam involved charging a three percent management fee to its wealthy clients in exchange for helping them to evade paying taxes by placing their money securely in one of the bank’s secret off-shore accounts. UBS would make money by investing their clients’ savings, often in weapons manufacturers and then, when the clients needed their money back, lending the money back at interest.
Birkenfeld estimated that the total assets in the secret U.S. accounts acquired and invested by UBS in Switzerland totaled a whopping $20 billion. By exposing and, in turn, putting a stop to the scam, Birkenfeld helped the U.S. government retrieve billions of tax dollars. The reason Birkenfeld was prosecuted by the Department of Justice, instead of UBS executives, seems to be because of the lobbying efforts of the chairman of UBS’s Americas division, Robert Wolf, a golfing partner and the 12th largest donor to President Obama, raising more than $500,000 for Obama’s 2012 election.[6] Wolf did not want to see any UBS executives prosecuted—but wanted to see Birkenfeld punished because he had become a whistleblower.
This egregious double standard and injustice is a reason why Birkenfeld should today be pardoned, along with Edward Snowden, Daniel Hale and John Kiriakou.
The anti-abortion activists had been charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. Police later discovered five fetuses in the home of the ringleader of the blockade, Lauren Handy, head of a self-described Catholic anarchist group that opposes both abortion and the death penalty. ↑
See David Cay Johnston, The Making of Donald Trump (New York: Melville House, 2016); Wayne Barrett, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention (New York: Regan Arts, 2016). ↑
Joe Biden had a better record than Trump with pardons, having commuted the sentence of American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier, for example, and pardoned Alex Saab as part of a diplomatic agreement with Venezuela. Biden, however, set a dubious standard by pardoning his son Hunter, who was convicted on gun and tax-related charges that appear to have been a small component of the criminal activities in which he was involved as a financial bagman for the Biden political empire. ↑
Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (New York: Macmillan, 2019). Detractors have claimed, without foundation, that Snowden was in the palm of the Russian intelligence services. Edward Jay Epstein, a once independent writer who long ago became a CIA shill, argued that Snowden was a Russian intelligence asset without corroborating evidence in his book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017). ↑
For more background on Kiriakou, see his book The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (New York: Bantam Books, 2010). ↑
According to The New York Times, Wolf served as an informal adviser to Obama after being appointed to the Economic Recovery Advisory Board from 2009 to 2011, the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness from 2011 to 2013, the Export Council from 2014 to 2016, and the Homeland Security Advisory Council’s Border Infrastructure Task Force in 2012. In 2017, Wolf was named to the board of directors for the Obama Foundation and chairs the foundation’s audit and risk committee. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
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