Snowden is still in contact with Russian intelligence,
 House report charges [Yahoo News]
Michael Isikoff
Chief Investigative Correspondent
Yahoo NewsDecember 22, 2016
Newly declassified passages from a highly critical House Intelligence Committee report on Edward Snowden assert that since arriving in Moscow the former NSA contractor “has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services.”
Minutes after the report was released Thursday, Snowden’s chief lawyer, Ben Wizner, tweeted that the report was “petulant nonsense.” Snowden has adamantly denied such contacts, most recently this month in an interview with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric. Snowden told Couric he gave Russian officials “the stiff-arm” when they first approached him in 2013, and that since then, while living with President Vladimir Putin’s approval as a fugitive in Moscow, “they have left me alone, for the most part.”
The panel’s newly declassified 33-page report, which is being released this morning, cites classified U.S. intelligence reporting to support its assertion of continuous contacts with Russian intelligence — an especially explosive charge in light of the current uproar in Washington over Russian interference in the U.S. election.
But all details of that intelligence reporting are still classified and blacked out in the report, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the public to assess. The charge comes at a time when Snowden’s defenders — who portray him as a courageous whistleblower who exposed U.S. surveillance abuses — are making their final, uphill pitch for a pardon before President Obama leaves office.
His lawyers have also repeatedly pointed out he has also criticized Russian surveillance practices; in his interview with Couric, Snowden said these “severe” criticisms have made him a “liability” to the Russians.
“The House committee spent three years and millions of dollars in a failed attempt to discredit Edward Snowden, whose actions led to the most significant intelligence reforms in a generation,” Wizner said in a statement after the committee’s release. “The report wholly ignores Snowden’s repeated and courageous criticism of Russian surveillance and censorship laws. It combines demonstrable falsehoods with deceptive inferences to paint an entirely fictional portrait of an American whistleblower.
“For all of its harsh rhetoric, the report contains no evidence whatsoever that Snowden’s intentions were anything other than public-minded, that his actions caused harm, or that he is under foreign influence — because no such evidence exists,” he added. “In fact, the NSA’s former deputy director has stated publicly that he does not believe that Snowden acted under the influence of a foreign power.”
A U.S. government official told Yahoo News the committee’s characterization of continuing contacts between Snowden and Russian intelligence reflects “the current thinking” of the U.S. intelligence community. But U.S. officials do not have evidence that Snowden has actually shared NSA documents with the Russians, said the official, who did not provide any further details about the nature of the alleged contacts. A congressional staffer familiar with the matter said the committee and the intelligence community have “high confidence” in the reports of continuous contacts and that “you don’t have high confidence based on a single [intelligence] report.”
House Intelligence Chair Rep. Devin Nunes said in a statement Thursday the newly declassified report shows Snowden’s “reckless disregard” for U.S. national security, adding, “I look forward to the day when he returns to the United States to face justice.”
California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the panel’s ranking minority member, added: “Snowden and his defenders claim that he is a whistleblower, but he isn’t, as the committee’s review shows.”
The House report fleshes out a three-page executive summary that was released in September and was approved on a bipartisan basis by all members of the intelligence committee. That summary — denounced as “aggressively dishonest” by one of the journalists who received documents from Snowden — labeled him a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” as well as a disgruntled employee who did “tremendous damage to national security” by disclosing classified material about U.S. surveillance practices. (The summary did not include the allegation about Snowden’s contacts with Russian intelligence, which was declassified by the U.S. intelligence community only this week.)
After the release of the executive summary, the committee asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to declassify the panel’s full report (much of which is based on secret U.S. intelligence reports and interviews with officials at the National Security Agency and other U.S. agencies). Many key sections of the document remain classified and blacked out — including 20 specific examples of damage that U.S. officials believe was caused by Snowden’s disclosures. Also still classified are estimates about the cost to the U.S. government — believed to be in the billions of dollars — to rebuild and repair U.S. signals intelligence systems capabilities as a result of his disclosures.
Still, the newly declassified version cites a wealth of previously undisclosed internal emails, memos and interviews to draw a highly unflattering portrait of Snowden as an intelligence community misfit driven as much by personal grievances as by his publicly stated concerns about invasions of U.S. privacy.
It also reveals a glaring internal screwup by U.S. intelligence officials that allowed documented concerns about Snowden’s conduct by the CIA to go undetected when he landed a job as an NSA contractor.