House committee counters Edward Snowden pardon push, biopic with brutal report

On Wednesday, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union launched a campaign aimed at securing a presidential pardon for fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden, timed to coincide with Oliver Stone's favorable biographical film, Snowden, coming out this weekend. 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 U.S. history. The Intelligence Committee also unanimously adopted a report by committee staffers on Snowden and released a three-page unclassified summary. Its assessment of Snowden is not favorable.

The classified report, two years in the making, shows that "the public narrative popularized by Snowden and his allies is rife with falsehoods, exaggerations, and crucial omissions, a pattern that began before he stole 1.5 million sensitive documents," the summary states. Snowden "caused tremendous damage to national security, and the vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests — they instead pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America's adversaries," though the report concedes that "the full scope of the damage inflicted by Snowden remains unknown."

The summary calls Snowden a longtime "serial exaggerator and fabricator," and suggests he stole the files not only out of civic duty but because he got in a "workplace spat with NSA managers" two weeks earlier and was reprimanded. "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."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The report also claims that Snowden flunked "basic annual training for NSA employees" on "the numerous privacy protects that govern the activities" of the intelligence community, including those relating to the PRISM program he would later expose, and "doctored his performance evaluations and obtained new positions at NSA by exaggerating his résumé and stealing the answers to an employment test."

Snowden ridiculed the report on Twitter, calling it "so artlessly distorted that it would be amusing if it weren't such a serious act of bad faith." You can read the House committee's summary for yourself, and watch Snowden make his case for a pardon below. Peter Weber