Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, center speaks via video conference to people in the Johns Hopkins University auditorium. | AP Photo

By Eric Geller

12/22/16 10:47 AM EST

Updated 12/22/16 11:30 AM EST

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has been in contact with Russian intelligence agents since he stole troves of classified documents, a House committee alleged on Thursday.

Since Snowdens arrival in Moscow, he has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services, the House Intelligence Committee said in a report on the Snowden leaks released Thursday.

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The declassified report, which is heavily redacted, did not offer proof of its serious accusation. It follows the committee's release in September of an executive summary of the then-classified document.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said in a statement that the report offers a fuller account of Edward Snowdens crimes and the reckless disregard he has shown for U.S. national security, including the safety of American servicemen and women.

The document casts Snowden as a dishonest miscreant and attempts to refute the portrayal of him as a duty-minded whistleblower.

The House panels report says there is no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about U.S. intelligence activities to any oversight officials within the U.S. government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so.

Snowden and his defenders claim that he feared reprisal and have pointed to numerous instances of the intelligence community retaliating against employees who complain about secret programs.

Ben Wizner, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing Snowden, blasted the report. In a statement, he said it "wholly ignores Snowdens repeated and courageous criticism of Russian surveillance and censorship laws" and "combines demonstrable falsehoods with deceptive inferences to paint an entirely fictional portrait of an American whistleblower."

Snowden himself weighed in on Twitter, arguing that the report relied on weak evidence to allege Russian collusion.

"After three years of investigation and millions of dollars," he wrote, "they can present no evidence of harmful intent, foreign influence, or harm. Wow."

The famous government leaker is now living in Moscow under a 2013 asylum deal granted after Snowden gave the media troves of classified documents that revealed the extent of the U.S. surveillance state. The incident touched off a global debate about personal privacy and eventually led to Congress passing surveillance reform legislation in 2015.

But the report argues that Snowden's disclosures went far beyond documents related to potential invasions of Americans' privacy. Instead, many exposed "secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation-states."

Specifically, the panel said the Pentagon uncovered 13 "high-risk issues" caused by these leaks.

"If the Russian or Chinese governments have access to this information, American troops will be at greater risk in any future conflict," the committee wrote.

House Intelligence ranking member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) in September joined his committee colleagues in writing a letter to President Barack Obama urging the outgoing commander in chief not to pardon Snowden.

"Most of the material he stole had nothing to do with Americans privacy," Schiff said on Thursday. "Its compromise has been of great value to America's adversaries and those who mean to do America harm."

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House report: Edward Snowden in contact with Russian agents

WASHINGTON Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden remains in contact with Russian intelligence services, according to a bipartisan congressional report released at a time when Russia is considered a top national security concern.

The two-year inquiry focused on Snowdens 2013 leak of classified U.S. material about Americas surveillance programs. It concluded that Snowden compromised national security by these disclosures and is avoiding prosecution while living in a country that is considered one of the top U.S. adversaries. In recent months, U.S. intelligence agencies have been outspoken about their beliefs that Russia actively interfered in the U.S. political process by hacking into private email accounts.

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Former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden, who leaked classified information on government surveillance, made his case to President Obama for a p...

The report sends a strong message to President Barack Obama during his final days in office: Do not pardon Edward Snowden.

Mr. Obama has not offered any indication that he is considering pardoning Snowden for the leaks that embarrassed the U.S. and angered allies. Lisa Monaco, Mr. Obamas adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism, said last year that Snowden should come home to the United States and be judged by a jury of his peers - not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime.

However, there has been a push by privacy advocacy groups to pardon the former NSA contractor who they herald as a whistleblower for leaking documents that disclosed the extent of the data the U.S. collects on Americans in its efforts to fight terrorism. After the disclosures, Mr. Obama reined in some of the surveillance authorities and put in place additional measures to provide more transparency to the classified programs.

The House intelligence committee released the report to provide what the panels chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., called a fuller account of Edward Snowdens crimes and the reckless disregard he has shown for U.S. national security.

The 33-page unclassified report pointed to statements in June 2016 by the deputy chairman of the defense and security committee in the Russian parliaments upper house, who asserted that Snowden did share intelligence with the Russian government.

The report said, Since Snowdens arrival in Moscow, he has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services. The following sentence was redacted, and there is nothing in the unclassified report that explains why the committee believes Snowden is still sharing intelligence with the Russians.

The committees top Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, said Snowden isnt a whistleblower as he and his defenders claim. Most of the material he stole had nothing to do with Americans privacy, and its compromise has been of great value to Americas adversaries and those who mean to do America harm, Schiff said.

Ben Wizner, Snowdens lawyer, dismissed the report and insisted that Snowden acted to inform the public.

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. The report wholly ignores Snowdens 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.

The Congressional report has also come under fire from Barton Gellman, one of the four reporters who originally met Snowden and received the leaked material in 2013.

The report is not only one-sided, not only incurious, not only contemptuous of fact. It is trifling, Gellman wrote back in September after reading a three-page executive summary of the report.

Gellman, who is now a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, challenged multiple claims in the report, including the fact that Snowden fled to Russia (he tried to fly to Ecuador, but the U.S. government trapped him in Moscow when they revoked his passport) and that Snowden exaggerated his duties as an entry-level computer technician (he had multiple information security roles with the CIA, including one that deployed him to Geneva under diplomatic cover and another that involved regular meetings with the chiefs and deputy chiefs of the CIAs technical branches, Gellman said.)

Three years later, the Snowden leaks continue to reverberate. One of the programs that came under great scrutiny is set to expire in a year, and it will be a top priority for the House committee, among others in Congress, to get it renewed. Under that program, the NSA sweeps up communications of non-Americans outside the U.S., and it can also capture the domestic communications of any American in contact with the terror suspect, even if those contacts have nothing to do with terrorism. The resulting sweeps are likely to have included emails and other data from tens of thousands of Americans over the past decade, experts have said.

Three years ago, Snowden revealed U.S. government efforts to hack into the data pipelines used by U.S. companies to serve customers overseas. The programs collected the telephone metadata records of millions of Americans and examined emails from overseas.

Snowden fled to Hong Kong and then to Russia to avoid prosecution.

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Congressional report charges Edward Snowden is in contact ...

A scathing report by the House Intelligence Committee, backed by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, concludes that Edward Snowden was a disgruntled, serial liar who leaked for petty reasons, put American soldiers at risk and remains in continuing contact with Russian intelligence services.

The 37-page review, filled with redactions of classified material, does not accuse Snowden of being a spy, but it seeks to poke holes in nearly every aspect of his account of why he gave reporters reams of classified documents he obtained as a contractor and trusted insider with the National Security Agency.

Snowden immediately began denouncing the report on Twitter from his home in Russia, saying its core claims were made "without evidence" and that it established nothing worse than he might have been hard to work with.

His lawyer, Ben Wizner, told NBC News he considers the report "a failed attempt to discredit Edward Snowden, whose actions led to the most significant intelligence reforms in a generation."

"The report wholly ignores Snowden's repeated and courageous criticism of Russian surveillance and censorship laws," Wizner said. "It combines demonstrable falsehoods with deceptive inferences to paint an entirely fictional portrait of an American whistleblower."

Rep. Adam Schiff, who represents a bright blue district in California and is the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the two-year review of classified documents explodes many myths advanced by Snowden supporters.

"Snowden and his defenders claim that he is a whistleblower, but he isn't," Schiff said. "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."

The report takes direct aim at Snowden's stated motives for removing an estimated 1.5 million documents from NSA in what officials have called the most significant leak of national security information in American history.

It portrays him as a serial exaggerator and fabricator who first exaggerated the importance of his job at the CIA where he worked before joining NSA and then lied about having ethical qualms about it. It says he cheated on a test that got him a job with NSA's elite Tailored Access Operations office, known as TAO.

Snowden has said that his "breaking point" was Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's false statement to Congress in March 2013 that the intelligence community was not collecting millions of records on Americans. As Snowden and other NSA employees knew, that was not true the NSA had for years been secretly gathering storing domestic calling records for use in terrorism investigations.

The report says that Snowden began downloading secrets eight months before, just a few weeks after a spat with his NSA supervisors.

One issue of contention, the report says, was a software patch Snowden installed while working at an NSA facility in Hawaii that caused servers to crash. After a manager complained in a mass email, Snowden fired back to a much more senior NSA official, leading to a rebuke that his conduct was unacceptable. He apologized and then began unauthorized downloads of material, the report says.

The report's passage on Snowden's alleged contacts with Russian intelligence services is mostly blacked out, but it quotes the deputy chairman of a Russian defense committee in parliament, who said in June that Snowden did share information with Russian intelligence.

On Twitter, Snowden pointed out that the Russian politician also said he was speculating. But the near-universal view across the U.S. intelligence community is that the Russians have access to much of what Snowden obtained.

Snowden has consistently denied cooperating with Russian intelligence. In 2014, he told NBC News during an exclusive U.S. broadcast interview that he had "no relationship with the Russian government at all" and was not a spy. He told Yahoo News he gave the Russians "the stiff arm."

In terms of damage, the report says the Pentagon identified eight "high risk issues" stemming from the Snowden leaks, including information that would put troops at risk if, as U.S. officials assume, the Russian and Chinese militaries now possess it.

The report lists 21 examples of ways in which Snowden's leaks caused "massive damage" to U.S. national security. But each one is blacked out.

In arguing that Snowden cannot be considered a whistleblower, the report points out that the vast majority of what he took most of which has never been disclosed had nothing to do with electronic surveillance issues or privacy and civil liberties.

The report also notes that he spied on colleagues, invading their personal privacy, and that he hunted for personnel records about promotions and hiring at NSA. And it says investigators could find no evidence he ever expressed any concerns to colleagues about the nature of NSA's surveillance work.

Snowden's disclosure that the NSA had been keeping phone calling records on nearly every American led to the overhaul of that program, and some other modest changes in the rules for U.S. surveillance.

But most of his leaks had little impact on how the NSA does business. His disclosure of the so-called PRISM program, for example under which the federal government spies on foreigners by gathering data from U.S. internet providers did not lead to the abandonment of that program, which is considered extremely valuable even though it incidentally collects some American data.

However, the law governing that program expires next year, and some commentators have wondered whether Democrats in Congress will support extending it under President Donald Trump.

The reporting on Snowden's disclosures by the Guardian and the Washington Post won major awards, as Snowden noted on Twitter.

"Not one page mentions this journalism won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, reformed our laws, and changed even the President's mind," Snowden said.

Yet the report notes with irony that in 2012, Snowden met with a training officer at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland and expressed concerns that he failed a test designed to train NSA operatives how to use the PRISM program while adhering to privacy and civil liberties standards.

"At no point during the visit did Snowden raise any concerns about how the NSA used" the program to collect internet data from American companies, the report said.

"This extensive report shows Snowden is no hero," said Rep. Lynn Westemoreland, a Georgia Republican who chairs an intelligence subccommittee that oversees NSA. "He should be brought to justice for his reckless actions."

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Congress calls Edward Snowden a liar in scathing new report

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Streaming via the Periscope app from his Twitter account, Snowden discussed with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey claims that fake news helped to sway the election in favour of President-elect Donald Trump.Facebook announced that it would be partnering with ABC News, Politifact, and Snopes to label fake news on their platform. Snowden stated that censorship was not the answer to the issue and that teaching people critical thinking would be much more beneficial.

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The problem of fake news isnt solved by hoping for a referee but rather because we as participants, we as citizens, we as users of these services help each other, said Snowden, The answer to bad speech is not censorship. The answer to bad speech is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting very popular.

Snowden did not state whether or not he believed the claims that fake news had swung the election in any way but rather pointed out the dangers of companies using terms like fake news to censor content with which they disagreed. Snowden stated that rather than waiting for gatekeepers to define what is and isnt fake news, people should have an open dialogue with each other and point out proven facts.

Snowden has previously stated the people must stop relying on one source for all of their news. Speaking at Fusions Real Future Fair, Snowden said, There seems to be no alternative to the larger services. Because of this network effect, because the first mover advantage. When you get a Google or a Facebook or Twitter in place, they never seem to leave, Snowden said. To have one company that has enough power to reshape the way we think, I dont think I need to describe how dangerous that is.

Watch a replay of Snowdens interview with Jack Dorsey here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart Tech covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com

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Edward Snowden: Don't Rely on 'Referee' to Censor 'Fake News ...

Ever since the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden fled to Hong Kong and handed hard drives filled with highly classified documents to the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, there has been rampant speculation over whether he was really a foreign agent.

The official story is well known. Snowden over time grew frustrated with the U.S. government's excessive domestic surveillance. In an act of civic bravery, he leaked the evidence to reporters from the Guardian and the Washington Post. As he was trying to travel to South America in May 2013, the State Department pulled his passport. Snowden has been stuck in Russia ever since.

Lots of people never bought that. The writer Edward Jay Epstein, for example, has argued that the scope of documents Snowden stole, most of which dealt with U.S. military and intelligence capabilities and not the dragnet collection of telephone data of ordinary citizens, suggest he was part of an intelligence operation. Mike Rogers, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has accused Snowden of working closely with Moscow.

So one might think that finally, after more than three years, a new unclassified report on Snowden from Rogers's former committee could shed some light on this matter. Unfortunately, the report released by the committee Thursday does no such thing.

On the vital question of whether Snowden worked with a foreign power when he was taking the documents he would eventually leak, the House investigation is a tease. There is a section titled "Foreign Influence." Yet all but two of its sentences, including supporting footnotes, are redacted.

The two sentences we are allowed to read don't tell us much. One quotes a fragment of an NPR interview with Frants Klintsevich, a member of the Russian Duma's defense and security committee. He says Snowden shared intelligence. Snowden himself tweeted that, in its written transcript of the interview, NPR excluded a caveat from Klintsevich that he was speculating about this.

The other sentence seems more tantalizing. "Since Snowden's arrival in Moscow, he has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services," it says. This would stand to reason. After all, Snowden would have invaluable information on the inner working of U.S. signal intelligence collection. Of course Russian intelligence officers would want to talk to him.

For now, though, this claim should be treated as speculation. The report does not provide any evidence to support it. Snowden denies that he is "in cahoots with Russian intel." The report also confirms that Snowden did not arrive in Moscow with the hard drives of documents that he provided to journalists.

Even if it's true that Snowden has been in touch with Russian spies, it does nothing to dispel or support the central question about whether hewas acting as a witting, or unwitting, foreign agent back in 2013. When I asked around about this Thursday, U.S. officials who were familiar with the unredacted report told me it remains an open question. Perhaps it does. But the public record tells a different story.

Chris Inglis, who was the deputy director of the NSA when Snowden first leaked the documents, earlier this year said, "I don't think he was in the employ of the Chinese or the Russians, I don't see any evidence to support that." He also said that he believed Snowden had intended to go to Latin America after he gave the hard drives to Greenwald and Poitras, and that his plan appeared to be hatched on the fly. The Inglis version of events is supported by other senior officials. The current head of the NSA, Admiral Michael Rogers, told the Defense News in 2014 that it was possible Snowden was a foreign agent, but he was "probably not."

Given all of this confusion, the U.S. intelligence community should declassify the new report's section on foreign influence. If this is really an open question, then the American people deserve to see all the evidence. If he was a spy, it would mean that our counter-intelligence professionals were outwitted again by Russia, just as they were with the moles Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. If Snowden really is who he claims to be, this too should be a matter of public record.

Instead, the U.S. intelligence community has added to the public's confusion by refusing to declassify the information. As a result, the redacted section of the House Intelligence Committee report on foreign influence is a species of innuendo. The public can't see the evidence, but trust us, there is something.

All of this is ironic. As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told me in 2014, it was a mistake to keep the NSA's program to collect the telephone metadata of U.S. citizens a secret for so long. That was the substance of Snowden's initial disclosure to the Washington Post and the Guardian.

Because the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations shielded this program from the public, Snowden was able to pose as a whistleblower, even though he also leaked reams of information that had nothing to do with the privacy rights of American citizens, including details about how the NSA had hacked computers in China.

In this sense, protecting an unnecessary secret enabled the mass disclosure of necessary secrets. The House Intelligence Committee's report on Snowden proves the U.S. government has yet to learn this lesson.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Eli Lake at elake1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

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Was Edward Snowden a Spy? The Answer Remains Classified