'Disgruntled' Snowden 'Not a Whistleblower' House Probe Concludes; Snowden Fires Back
Ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden "was not a whistleblower" but a "disgruntled employee" who lied often and did "tremendous damage" to national security through his document leaks, concluded the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in a declassified bipartisan report released…
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Thursday. After a two-year investigation, committee members released the 38-page redacted report along with a document with report highlights and a news release. Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said "it will take a long time to mitigate the damage" Snowden caused, and ranking member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said the former contractor wasn't a whistleblower. "Most of the material he stole had nothing to do with Americans’ privacy, and its compromise has been of great value to America's adversaries and those who mean to do America harm," said Schiff. Among the findings, the report said Snowden cheated on an NSA test to obtain a position and had numerous run-ins with supervisors at the CIA and NSA. The report also said "the vast majority of documents" Snowden took were unrelated to electronic surveillance, privacy and civil liberties, but he did infringe on the privacy of NSA personnel by searching their drives without permission. The committee also said it's still concerned the NSA and intelligence community hasn't done enough to lessen the risk of another unauthorized disclosure. In a series of tweets, Snowden countered several report assertions, including one tweet that said: "Bottom line: this report's core claims are made without evidence, are often contrary to both common sense and the public record." Another Snowden tweet said: "It is an endless parade of falsity so unbelievable it comes across as parody. Yet unintentionally exonerating:" Former Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, who wrote about government surveillance based on Snowden's leaks, also wrote a scathing commentary, calling the committee's report "trifling." Gellman is a senior fellow for The Century Foundation, which published his commentary.