The report is being released amid a new push by Mr Snowden and his supporters to obtain a presidential pardon, and in the same week as director Oliver Stone’s broadly favourable biopic, Snowden, reaches cinemas. The film apparently portrays the former NSA contractor as a heroic whistle-blower.
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The report comes a day after two right groups launched a campaign for President Obama to pardon Mr Snowden. He’s in exile in Moscow and hoping to receive a pardon from President Barack Obama. The report also argued that Snowden was not the whistleblower he portrays himself to be but describes him as a disgruntled worker who did not disclose the classified information to the appropriate law enforcement or oversight personnel.
Release of the digital documents to media groups in 2013 “did severe damage to US national security, compromising the intelligence community’s anti-terror efforts and endangering the security of the American people as well as active-duty USA troops”, the committee said.
“A close review of Snowden’s official employment records and submissions reveals a pattern of intentional lying”, writes the committee.
“It is also not clear Snowden understood the numerous privacy protections that govern the activities of the [Intelligence Community]”, the summary says.
“Edward Snowden is no hero – he’s a traitor who willfully betrayed his colleagues and his country”, said committee chair Devin Nunes in a statement.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), ranking member of the committee, said the investigation found that Snowden’s claims that he acted to defend Americans’ privacy were “self serving and false” and that he did “profound” damage to national security. He said the public had a right to be informed of the programs so it could engage in debate about the proper scope of such surveillance.
“Edward Snowden is not a whistleblower”, Earnest told reporters.
The committee released only a four-page summary of what it said was a 36-page investigative report that remains Top Secret, but the summary contained strong words about Snowden’s actions and background. Most of the documents he leaked, they argued, were defence secrets unrelated to the privacy of U.S. citizens.
Snowden is living in Russian Federation under a grant of political asylum.
Intelligence officials have said that material he leaked helped Russian Federation and China protect themselves from USA surveillance, and taught terrorist groups such as Islamic State to better hide their tracks. And the intelligence committees, as well as some lawmakers on other committees, had been briefed on it.
The committee concluded that Snowden is not a whistle-blower because he did not try to raise his civil liberties concerns through official channels or with Congress, and most of the data he stole from NSA computers was not related to privacy concerns.
“They’ve been using the same rhetoric about damage to national security for three and a half years and have produced absolutely no evidence of concrete harm”, he said.
The Committee says it is concerned that NSA and intelligence community in general have not done enough to prevent “another massive unauthorized disclosure of documents”.
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Two weeks before he began to download classified documents at an NSA installation in Hawaii, the report said, he was reprimanded after “engaging in a workplace spat” with managers.
