Snowden should be heard: Hillary

The former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has said Edward Snowden should have the right to launch a legal and public defence of his decision to leak top-secret documents if he returns to the United States.
"If he wishes to return knowing he would be held accountable and also able to present a defence, that is his decision to make," Hillary said in a video interview with the Guardian on Friday.
Snowden, who is currently in Russia where he has been afforded temporary asylum, has been charged with three separate violations of the US Espionage Act. These charges include stealing government property and sharing classified documents with the Guardian and the Washington Post.
The broadly worded law makes no distinction between a spy and a whistleblower and affords Snowden almost no recourse to a defence.
When Hillary was asked if she believed the Espionage Act – passed in 1917 – should be reformed in order to allow Snowden a defence, she claimed not to know what the whistleblower had been charged with as they were "sealed indictments".
"In any case that I'm aware of as a former lawyer, he has a right to mount a defence," she said. "And he certainly has a right to launch both a legal defence and a public defence, which can of course affect the legal defence.