The committee, on the other hand, called Snowden a “disgruntled employee who had frequent conflicts with his managers”.
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On Thursday, the House Intelligence Committee urged President Obama in a letter not to pardon Snowden, saying he perpetrated “the largest and most damaging” leak of classified information in US history.
Edward Snowden, the famous “whistle-blower” who uncovered the biggest surveillance program in the history of humanity, has been the center of a humanitarian campaign asking president Obama to give the computer system’s administrator a full pardon.
The Republican-led committee released a three-page unclassified summary of its two-year bipartisan examination of how Snowden was able to remove the documents from secure NSA networks, what the documents contained and the damage their removal caused to USA national security.
The report’s summary also accused Snowden of claiming he had left Army basic training earlier in his career because of broken legs, as The Guardian reported when Snowden first came forward, “when in fact he washed out because of shin splints”.
The committee hasn’t released the entire 36-page document as its information is classified, according to CBS News.
Republican Devin Nunes, chairman of the committee, said Mr Snowden betrayed his colleagues and his country.
The report, embedded at the bottom of this article in full, is a four-page summary of a larger 36-page document, which officials said will remain classified because it contains valuable details regarding U.S. intelligence operations.
Snowden mocked the committee’s findings on Twitter, challenging several points. “Bottom line: after “two years of investigation”, the American people deserve better”. “Snowden’s official employment records and [document] submissions reveals a pattern of intentional lying”, the report says.
I could go on. He claimed the report’s release was timed to discourage people from seeing the film.
It says that Snowden “failed basic annual training for NSA employees on Section 702” – a controversial part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows for the mass collection of information on foreign communications, which Snowden’s later disclosures threw into the worldwide spotlight.
But White House spokesman Josh Earnest dismissed pressure for a pardon on Wednesday, saying Snowden would enjoy legal due process at a trial in the United States, where he faces up to 30 years in prison for espionage and theft of state secrets. Both are playing hardline cards on national security issue.
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Now, with presidential elections set for November 8, both presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, have expressed strong opposition of pardoning Snowden, saying he must be punished for harming the country’s national security.
