The House Intelligence Committee report was ordered in August 2014 by high-ranking U.S. officials, well over a year after Snowden started releasing documents through selected journalists, in June 2013.
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Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has hit back at a U.S. government report that urges president Barack Obama not to pardon him.
The committee, instead, released a brief three-page unclassified executive summary of its two-year investigation into the Snowden case.
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.
Mr Snowden is seeking a presidential pardon because he says he helped his country by revealing secret domestic surveillance programmes.
The US government has struggled to manage the effects of Snowden’s disclosures, which brought to light extensive its digital surveillance programmes and have led to dramatic changes in digital communications security and worldwide data-sharing arrangements, including the annullation of a data-sharing treaty between the US and the EU.
Snowden admitted that he did not read all of the stolen documents in an interview with John Oliver in April, 2015, and also acknowledged that he may have endangered an intelligence operation fighting al-Qaida in Iraq through the massive leak.
“He put our service members and the American people at risk after perceived slights by his superiors”. The summary also claims Snowden is a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” who lied about why he dropped out of the Army and stole answers to an employment test, among other purported falsehoods.
If the comments from White House press secretary Josh Earnest are any guide, it seems unlikely that the Obama administration would choose to pardon Snowden.
Snowden fled with classified documents first to Hong Kong, where he hid among Sri Lankan refugees in cramped tenements, then received political asylum in Russian Federation after the United States revoked his passport while he was en route to Ecuador. “This report diminishes the committee”. Stone said at a press conference at the Toronto Film Festival last week in reference to United States government surveillance programs.
The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch launched a campaign in support of Snowden this week.
This report comes more than a year after Congress reined in the Intelligence Agency in response to Snowden’s revelations.
Last year, Lisa Monaco, Obama’s advisor on homeland security and counterterrorism, said in response to a We the People petition on behalf of Snowden: “If he felt his actions were consistent with civil disobedience, then he should do what those who have taken issue with their own government do: Challenge it, speak out, engage in a constructive act of protest, and – importantly – accept the consequences of his actions”.
In 2015, a similar pardon campaign gathered more than 160,000 signatures but a poll the same year from the American Civil Liberties Union, which is backing the new campaign, found that almost two-thirds of Americans viewed him negatively.
“I also understand the Hollywood version of the Snowden story is coming to movie theaters this weekend”.
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Mr Snowden thanked human rights groups for their campaign to seek a pardon for him from President Barack Obama. It’s an important message to keep in mind as Oliver Stone’s biopic of the notorious whistleblower eventually blurs the line between documentary and fiction.
