The petition did not help: the US is not going to pardon Snowden

Two years ago, in the summer of 2013, a petition appeared on Whitehouse.gov, calling for pardon of Edward Snowden, who was known for exposing the pervasive work of American intelligence services. As a former employee of these same services, he is accused of treason and the dissemination of secret documents.

The scandal that erupted after this, though it sounded loud enough in the media, but did not seem to lead to any real changes. The NSA both listened to mass communication, and continues to do so, and no president or head of the three-letter agency was hurt by the proceedings.
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The petition quickly gained 100,000 sympathetic votes, and, as promised by the White House, came in for official consideration. True, the US government did not promise specific dates for the consideration of petitions, and the official response to it came only yesterday, two years later .

As one would expect, no one is going to pardon the traitor to the Snowden homeland. Snowden himself noted that he agreed to return to the United States if a fair trial awaits him there - but, as noted in the comments to the news, knowledgeable people, according to the current law, he will not be able to justify his actions by discovering the illegal behavior of the agency in which he worked. And since he does not deny that he distributed the documents, the result of the court is predetermined.

In response to the petition, Lisa Monaco, US presidential adviser on state security and anti-terrorism, in particular, writes:

Instead of taking constructive measures in connection with the problems he discovered, his [Snowden] decision, expressed in the theft and publication of classified information, had grave consequences for the security of our country and the people working on this security.
If it seemed to him that his actions were civil disobedience, he needed to follow the example of others and fight against these measures, talk about his doubts, hold constructive protests, and accept the consequences of his actions.
He needs to go home and face a jury trial, and not hide under the protection of an authoritarian regime. Now he just ran away from the consequences of his actions.

One of his lawyers, Ben Weisner, argues that under the espionage law of 1917, which Snowden is accused of, there is no difference between transferring documents to the press in the public interest and selling it to a foreign enemy. And the fact that information about mass wiretapping did not need to be kept secret from the public at all would not help him at the trial.

In the summer of the same 2013, Snowden was granted asylum in Russia, which the US cannot press hard enough to extradite him. In July 2014, his longtime friend Lindsay Mills moved to Edward from the Hawaiian Islands, and from then on they live in Snowden’s Moscow apartment. And in March 2015, he expressed a desire to leave Russia and move to Switzerland. He may have changed his opinion after the very country that recently recently resignedly allowed the United States to arrest on its territory and transport to them those involved in the high-profile corruption case in FIFA.

Snowden's other lawyer, Jasselin Redak, clarified that her client is not at all hiding from justice and not running away from him. According to her, the problem is that Snowden's passport was recalled at the time when he was in transit in Russia, going to Latin America.