 As if you needed another reason to support Bernie Sanders, he just took a stand on an incredibly significant issue. So when it comes to the war on whistleblowers that has been waged by Obama and now Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders has declared the side that he's on. He's on the side of whistleblowers. Now as Ryan Grimm writes in an article for The Intercept, Bernie Sanders pledges to end the practice of prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act and he writes, The century old law had largely gone out of fashion until it was deployed heavily by the Obama administration, which prosecuted eight people accused of leaking to the media under the Espionage Act, more than all previous presidents combined. President Donald Trump is on pace to break Barack Obama's record if he gets a second term. He has prosecuted eight such whistleblowers, five of them using the Espionage Act, according to the press freedom tracker. The Espionage Act, which was passed in 1917 to suppress opposition to World War One and now considers leakers to effectively be spies, makes a fair trial impossible as relevant evidence is classified and kept from the defense and the bar for conviction is low. The law also comes with stiffer criminal penalties and longer sentences than more obvious charges that might be leveled, such as mishandling classified intelligence. If he would give a second look at the record setting the length of the sentence told out to National Security Agency contractor reality winner Sanders demerred saying that he was supportive of whistleblowers, but unfamiliar with her case, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who joined Sanders during the interview agreed, I don't want to speak out of turn when it comes to reality winner, but I just think that the prosecution of whistleblowers is frankly against our democracy. We rely on whistleblowers. We rely on journalists in order for us to hold our systems accountable. And that is really important for him to say I am taking the side of whistleblowers. That is that's fantastic. That would be a change that is much needed to protect democracy, right, to allow people to not fear that they're going to be harshly prosecuted under the Espionage Act. If they leak information to the public that the American people need to know. Now having said that, we still have to push Bernie Sanders in a more positive direction. I would like a firm commitment from him to protect and pardon whistleblowers such as reality winner Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. Now Julian Assange is not an American citizen, but I mean to drop the charges, to not prosecute him, to not opt for his extradition that would be huge. Now to her credit, I think Tulsi Gabbard is the only presidential candidate who has actually said I would pardon these whistleblowers. But this is still a huge thing for one of the front runners like Bernie Sanders to say to take a stand here, to draw a line in the sand and say we're no longer going to prosecute whistleblowers under the Espionage Act. That's important. We just got to press him a little bit harder to maybe opt for pardoning them. Now I do want to play a really quick clip from Ryan Grimm's interview so you can hear it from Bernie Sanders himself. So look, this is really important and this shouldn't be a thing that president candidates should even have to address. It should just be, you know, common procedure that of course we stand up for whistleblowers. People who expose corruption, who expose our government's war crimes shouldn't have to fear prosecution. They already know that they're going to be persecuted by powerful people for exposing these things, but they shouldn't have to fear that they will be jailed if they expose things that the American people need to know. And Bernie Sanders here is saying what needed to be said a long time ago. So I really give him credit here because this is huge. And as Edward Snowden puts it, whoa, yeah, whoa is right because this really is huge. We need this. It was really demoralizing to see President Barack Obama aggressively prosecute whistleblowers harsher than any other president. That was awful. And that set a precedent that, of course, led to Donald Trump in future presidents potentially doing the same thing. But Bernie is saying, I'm not going to do that. Other presidential contenders need to also commit to not prosecuting whistleblowers. Now would I believe them? No. So I believe Bernie Sanders. That's what's different. But to hear him say it, even though I knew this was the stance that he would take, it just reaffirms the fact that he is the real deal. And we all need to rally behind him if we want to defeat the establishment in 2020.