The report by a Republican-led U.S. House Representative committee said Snowden, a former CIA employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who has fled to Russian Federation, is “a serial exaggerator and fabricator” instead of a whistle blower.
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“He had been reprimanded just two weeks before he began to illegally downloading classified documents”, said the Intelligence Committee in a statement.
“The Committee found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about United States intelligence activities – legal, moral, or otherwise – to any oversight officials within the USA government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so”.
The lawmakers argue that because Snowden released over 1.5 million files -many of which weren’t related to NSA’s surveillance program, according to the comittie- he doesn’t qualify as a whistle-blower, but as a criminal.
Snowden was an NSA contract employee when he took the documents and leaked them to journalists who revealed massive domestic surveillance programs begun in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the committee, said Snowden betrayed his colleagues and his country.
The Obama administration has not agreed to give Snowden a presidential pardon, and urged him to return to the United States and face trial immediately.
The Intelligence Committee also unanimously adopted a report by committee staffers on Snowden and released a three-page unclassified summary. “Despite Snowden’s later claim that the March 2013 congressional testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was a “breaking point” for him”, the report says, “these mass downloads predated Director Clapper’s testimony by eight months”.
The report comes a day after two right groups launched a campaign for President Obama to pardon Mr Snowden.
In an interview on Thursday for C-SPAN’s Newsmakers, Californian Congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said: “The majority of what he took has to do with military secrets and defense secrets”.
The report by staff members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence claimed that the great unwashed did not know the truth about Snowden because their version of events was rife with falsehoods, exaggerations, and crucial omission.
Speaking at a conference in Athens by video link from Moscow, Snowden said: “As a privacy advocate, I think it’s important for me. that there should never be an obligation for an individual to discuss their vote”.
The release of the report coincides with the release of the movie “Snowden”, directed by Oliver Stone, which portrays the former intelligence contractor as a whistleblower and hero.
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Friday joined a growing list of celebrities, industry leaders and other public figures campaigning for a presidential pardon for Edward Snowden.
