Edward Snowden didn’t email surveillance concerns …

President Obama's administration and a key senator on Thursday rebutted Edward Snowden's claim that he expressed concerns about the legality of government surveillance programs to his superiors at the National Security Agency before he exposed the programs and fled the country last June.

Snowden, a former contractor with the NSA who now resides in Moscow as a fugitive from the U.S. government, has been called a whistleblower by supporters who believe he exposed real wrongdoing in his leaks of classified programs. But the U.S. government has disputed that characterization, saying Snowden never raised concerns about the programs through any channels available to genuine whistleblowers.

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Col. Jeff McCausland (Ret.), CBS News Military Analyst, discusses Edward Snowden's first US network interview while in exile in Russia.

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Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden says he is not under the control of the Russian government and hasn't given Russia any intelligence document...

Not so, Snowden told NBC News in an interview that aired Monday.

"I actually did go through channels and that is documented," Snowden said. "The NSA has records. They have copies of emails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks, from me raising concerns about the NSA's interpretations of its legal authorities."

"Now, I had raised these complaints not just officially in writing through email to these offices and these individuals but to my supervisors, to my colleagues in more than one office," he continued. "I reported that there were real problems with the way the NSA was interpreting its legal authorities and the response, more or less, in bureaucratic language, was 'you should stop asking questions.'"

In response, the NSA released the email exchange in question on Thursday. In a statement, the agency said Snowden "did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed. There was not additional follow-up noted."

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Edward Snowden didn't email surveillance concerns ...