The report says that the House Committee’s investigation “found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about U.S. intelligence activities – legal, moral, or otherwise, noting that he never took his purported concerns about government surveillance to any oversight officials within the U.S. Government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so”.
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On Thursday, members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence unanimously approved a report on Snowden, who is facing a 30-year prison sentence on espionage charges for leaking secret documents on United States surveillance programs, that labels him as a “serial exaggerator” and aims to create a sharp contrast with the digital privacy community’s portrayal of the exiled former contractor as a celebrity whistleblower. It also goes on to claim that the former contractor had a “spat” with managers two weeks before he started to download documents; says he “was, and remains, a serial exaggerator and fabricator”.
The Guardian, which helped him disclose leak documents to the public, reported on September 13 that Snowden has stepped up a campaign for a presidential pardon.
And the report criticizes Snowden for sometimes citing as part of his motivation for the leaks testimony in March 2013 by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, in which Clapper falsely said the NSA did not collect records about millions of Americans.
This report comes more than a year after Congress reined in the Intelligence Agency in response to Snowden’s revelations. “This report diminishes the committee”.
The former National Security Agency contractor, who released thousands of classified documents in 2013 revealing the vast U.S. surveillance put in place after the September 11, 2001 attacks, now lives in Russian Federation.
Reacting on Twitter, Snowden addressed several specific allegations in the report before categorically dismissing the document.
Far from being an ethical whistleblower, according to the report, Snowden bypassed the formal procedures that protect federal workers who report government and agency wrongdoing.
For instance, the report indicates that Snowden began downloading NSA secrets eight months earlier than Snowden has claimed. He is also a lawyer for Edward Snowden.
Calling the 1.5 million figure “wildly inflated”, Wizner said that “if they are as loose as that with other facts in their report, there is nothing here of value”.
“His conduct put American lives at risk and it risked American national security”, he told reporters.
WELNA: Just how much of what Snowden took from the NSA actually fell into enemy’s hands is unclear in the report’s summary.
Ben Wizner is with the American Civil Liberties Union. While the film is lacking in some areas, it is ultimately worth seeing and I appreciate Snowden’s courage to question and hope he is able to maintain his safety.
Judging by the resoluteness of U.S. officials’ tone, the chances President Barack Obama will pardon Edward Snowden appear very slim, and close to none before November’s presidential election.
Republican candidate Donald Trump has called Snowden “a bad guy”, adding, “you know there is still a thing called execution”.
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NUNES: Well, we know because we – we’ve seen it, or we know it was taken, not necessarily what was leaked.
