NSA Releases Edward Snowden Email To Push Back At …

Edward Snowden is interviewed via a BEAM remote pressence system during the 2014 TED confernece March 18, 2014, in Vancouver, Canada. Snowden said the biggest revelations have yet to come out of the estimated 1.7 million documents he acquired from the National Security Agency. (Photo by Steven Rosenbaum/Getty Images) | Steven Rosenbaum via Getty Images

The NSA on Thursday released an email sent by former contractor Edward Snowden that the agency says undermines his claim to be a whistleblower. But a Snowden legal adviser immediately dismissed the email as a red herring and said Snowden "raised many complaints over many channels."

The agency's release of the email comes a day after Snowden appeared for the first time on a U.S. television program -- an appearance that could humanize him to American viewers and improve his chances of receiving some sort of a plea deal on Espionage Act charges. The agency asserts that the short email exchange from April 2013, between Snowden and an employee of the NSA's Office of General Counsel, shows he made no effort to raise concerns internally about wrongdoing or abuse.

In the email below, Snowden asks whether presidential executive orders have precedence over congressional statutes. He receives a brief response from an employee whose name has been redacted, who told Snowden that executive orders cannot override a law -- but are generally treated on an equal footing within the intelligence committee.

"The e-mail did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed," a NSA spokesperson said in an accompanying statement. "There are numerous avenues that Mr. Snowden could have used to raise other concerns or whistleblower allegations. We have searched for additional indications of outreach from him in those areas and to date have not discovered any engagements related to his claims."

In an email to HuffPost, Snowden's legal adviser at the American Civil Liberties Union, Ben Wizner, dismissed the email exchange as irrelevant.

"This whole issue is a red herring," he wrote. "The problem was not some unknown and isolated instance of misconduct. The problem was that an entire system of mass surveillance had been deployed -- and deemed legal -- without the knowledge or consent of the public."

"On the specific issue: Snowden raised many complaints over many channels. The NSA is releasing a single part of a single exchange -- after previously claiming that no evidence existed."

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NSA Releases Edward Snowden Email To Push Back At ...