House Intel Panel: Edward Snowden 'Was No Whistleblower'

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Summarizing its investigation of Edward Snowden, the House Intelligence Committee says the former National Security Agency contractor did tremendous damage to the U.S.

The committee published the summary findings of a two-year investigation Thursday as a new film about Snowden opens across the country.

Snowden stole 1.5 million classified government documents that he had access to as an NSA contractor. He then fled to Russia via Hong Kong.

As NPR's David Welna reports:

"Most major congressional reports are rolled out with news conferences, floor speeches and press releases. Not this one. There is only a three-page unclassified summary of the House Intelligence Committee's actual 36-page report, which remains classified. "[Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the panel]: The report is based on facts, so it's just all the facts that we gathered over a two-year process, and the report ... I think, speaks for itself."

The summary is available here. It contains five major points:

Snowden caused "tremendous damage to national security," and the documents he stole had nothing to do with programs affecting individual privacy interests. Rather, the documents pertained to "military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America's adversaries." The report says the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to mitigate the damage Snowden caused.

Snowden is not a whistleblower but a disgruntled employee whose actions infringed on the privacy of thousands of government employees and contractors. A real whistleblower, the report suggests, would have remained in the U.S. and not fled to China and Russia.

Two weeks before he began the massive download of 1.5 million documents, Snowden had a "workplace spat" with NSA managers.

Snowden is "a serial exaggerator and fabricator" who told a series of untrue stories about his health, education and performance reviews.

The committee says it is concerned that NSA and the intelligence community in general have not done enough to prevent "another massive unauthorized disclosure of documents."

The committee unanimously voted to endorse the report, and all members signed a letter to President Obama urging him not to pardon Snowden.

The committee's report may or may not have anything to do with the release of the new biopic Snowden, directed by Oliver Stone and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the title role.

David also reports that committee member Tom Rooney, R-Fla., was especially bothered by the trailer he has seen for the movie:</s>WASHINGTON, Sept 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. House Intelligence panel issued a scathing report on Thursday accusing National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of lying about his background, feuding with co-workers and leaking secrets that "caused tremendous damage" to U.S. security.

The House of Representatives Intelligence Committee report declared that Snowden was "not a whistleblower" as he has claimed in interviews and that most of the material he stole from NSA outposts was about intelligence and defense programs of great interest to U.S. foreign adversaries. (Reporting by Mark Hosenball; Editing by David Alexander)</s>WASHINGTON, Sept 15 (Reuters) - A U.S. House committee issued a scathing report on Thursday accusing National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of lying about his background, feuding with co-workers and leaking secrets that "caused tremendous damage" to U.S. security.

The House of Representatives Intelligence Committee report declared that Snowden was "not a whistleblower" as he has claimed in interviews and that most of the material he stole from NSA outposts was about intelligence and defense programs of great interest to U.S. foreign adversaries.

The committee only released a four-page summary of what it said was a 36-page investigative report by committee staff that remains highly classified. But the summary contained strong words about Snowden's actions and background.

The committee said that while the "full scope" of damage caused by Snowden's disclosures remains unknown, a review of materials he allegedly compromised "makes clear that he handed over secrets that protect American troops overseas and secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation-states."

The House Committee's release of the report coincides with the release of "Snowden," a Hollywood movie directed by Oliver Stone, which portrays the former intelligence contractor as a whistleblower and hero.

On Wednesday, prominent human rights advocates publicly urged President Barack Obama to issue a pardon for Snowden before he leaves office - a suggestion Snowden himself made to the Guardian newspaper earlier in the week.

U.S. officials have said that Obama is not considering a pardon for Snowden, who is facing U.S. criminal charges for providing classified information to unauthorized persons, and that there is no discussion of such a pardon inside the Justice Department. (Reporting by Mark Hosenball; editing by David Alexander and Cynthia Osterman)</s>WASHINGTON (AP) — A House intelligence committee report on National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden says he's not a whistleblower and that the vast majority of the documents he stole were military and defense secrets that had nothing to do with Americans' privacy.

The committee on Thursday released a three-page unclassified summary of its two-year investigation into the Snowden case. The committee says that contrary to Snowden's self-portrayal as a whistleblower, the report reveals that he was a "disgruntled employee who had frequent conflicts with his managers."

The report comes as Snowden, living in Russia, seeks a presidential pardon because he says he helped his country by revealing secret domestic surveillance programs.

FILE - This June 6, 2013 file photo, the National Security Agency (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Md. A House intelligence committee report on NSA leaker Edward Snowden says he¿s not a whistleblower and that the vast majority of the documents he stole were military and defense secrets that had nothing to do with Americans¿ privacy. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

Snowden's actions led to revelations about the NSA's bulk collection of millions of Americans' phone records.</s>WASHINGTON — A House intelligence committee report is calling National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” who doesn’t fit the profile of a whistleblower.

Snowden’s attorney denounced the committee’s report, released on the eve of the opening of the movie “Snowden,” and called him a “genuine American hero.”

Separately, all members of the committee sent a bipartisan letter to President Barack Obama on Thursday urging him not to pardon Snowden.

Snowden’s revelations about the agency’s bulk collection of millions of Americans’ phone records set off a fierce debate that pit civil libertarians concerned about privacy against more hawkish lawmakers fearful about losing tools to combat terrorism. Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans pushed through a reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act last year that ended the program.

“Mr. Snowden’s claim that he stole this information and disclosed it to protect Americans, privacy and civil liberties is undercut by his actions,” the letter said. “Rather than avail himself of the many lawful avenues to express legal, moral, or ethical qualms with U.S. intelligence activities, Mr. Snowden stole 1.5 million classified documents from National Security Agency networks.”

The Republican-led committee released a three-page unclassified summary of its two-year bipartisan examination of how Snowden was able to remove the documents from secure NSA networks, what the documents contained and the damage their removal caused to U.S. national security.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said the probe revealed that the vast majority of what Snowden took had nothing to do with Americans’ privacy.

“The majority of what he took has to do with military secrets and defense secrets,” Schiff said in an interview Thursday for C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers.” ”I think that’s very much at odds with the narrative that he wants to tell that he is a whistleblower.”

Snowden was an NSA contract employee when he took the documents and leaked them to journalists who revealed massive domestic surveillance programs begun in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The programs collected the telephone metadata records of millions of Americans and examined emails from overseas.

Snowden fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, to avoid prosecution and now wants a presidential pardon because he says he helped his country by revealing secret domestic surveillance programs.

The Obama administration has urged Snowden to return to the U.S. and face trial. Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi has said “there is no question his actions have inflicted serious harms on our national security.”

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House intelligence committee, said Snowden betrayed his colleagues and his country.

“He put our service members and the American people at risk after perceived slights by his superiors,” Nunes said in a statement. “In light of his long list of exaggerations and outright fabrications detailed in this report, no one should take him at his word. I look forward to his eventual return to the United States, where he will face justice for his damaging crimes.”

Snowden insists he has not shared the full cache of 1.5 million classified documents with anyone. However, the report notes that in June, the deputy chairman of the Russian parliament’s defense and security committee publicly conceded that “Snowden did share intelligence” with his government.

Ben Wizner, Snowden’s attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the committee’ report was an attempt to discredit a “genuine American hero.”

“After years of investigation, the committee still can’t point to any remotely credible evidence that Snowden’s disclosures caused harm,” Wizner said. “In a more candid moment, the NSA’s former deputy director, who was directly involved in the government’s investigation, explicitly said he didn’t believe Snowden had cooperated with either China or Russia.”

The committee, on the other hand, called Snowden a “disgruntled employee who had frequent conflicts with his managers.”

According to the committee, Snowden began mass downloads of classified material two weeks after he was reprimanded for engaging in a spat with NSA managers. The committee also described Snowden as a “serial exaggerator and fabricator.”

“A close review of Snowden’s official employment records and submissions reveals a pattern of intentional lying,” the report said. “He claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints. He claimed to have obtained a high school degree equivalent when in fact he never did. “

The report said Snowden claimed to have worked for the CIA as a senior adviser, when he was a computer technician.

“He also doctored his performance evaluations and obtained new positions at NSA by exaggerating his resume and stealing the answers to an employment test,” the report said.

Speaking by video link from Moscow, Snowden said Wednesday that whistleblowing “is democracy’s safeguard of last resort, the one on which we rely when all other checks and balances have failed and the public has no idea what’s going on behind closed doors.”

The 33-year-old addressed a New York City news conference where advocates from the ACLU, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International announced an online petition drive to urge Obama to pardon Snowden before he leaves office.</s>Edward Snowden exaggerated his resume, stole test answers and failed training on U.S. surveillance law before he copied an estimated 1.5 million classified documents from the National Security Agency, according to a summary of a House Intelligence Committee report released Thursday.

The committee unanimously adopted the investigative report a day before Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” premieres in movie theaters. The film apparently portrays the former NSA contractor as a heroic whistle-blower.

Civil liberties advocates have launched a national publicity campaign calling on President Obama to pardon Snowden, who has been accused of espionage, before he leaves office.

Committee members sent a bipartisan letter to Obama urging him not to pardon Snowden.

The House report provides new details about Snowden’s background, and calls into question his self-declared motivations and his work at the NSA before he fled to China and then Russia, where he now lives.

It describes him as a “serial exaggerator and fabricator.”

“Contrary to Snowden’s self-portrayal as a principled whistle-blower,” the committee said in a statement, he was “a disgruntled employee who had frequent conflicts with his managers and was reprimanded” shortly before he began downloading the trove of NSA documents.

Release of the digital documents to media groups in 2013 “did severe damage to U.S. national security, compromising the intelligence community’s anti-terror efforts and endangering the security of the American people as well as active-duty U.S. troops,” the committee said.

The release also led to a public debate about U.S. intelligence powers, and new restrictions on how far the NSA can go in surveillance of U.S. citizens.

Committee members said their two-year investigation found most of the files Snowden took had no civil liberties concerns, but instead revealed spying programs against adversaries and allied governments.

“Edward Snowden is no hero — he’s a traitor who willfully betrayed his colleagues and his country,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Tulare), the committee chairman, said in a statement. “In light of his long list of exaggerations and outright fabrications detailed in this report, no one should take him at his word.”

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), ranking member of the committee, said the investigation found that Snowden’s claims that he acted to defend Americans’ privacy were “self serving and false” and that he did “profound” damage to national security.

“While those disclosures did spark a useful public debate, the collateral damage has been extraordinary,” Schiff said.

Snowden disputed how he was characterized by the committee, writing on Twitter that "Congress spent two years writing a report to discourage you from going to see" Stone's film.

"Their report is so artlessly distorted that it would be amusing if it weren't such a serious act of bad faith," Snowden wrote.

The 36-page investigative report remains classified, but a three-page summary released by the committee shows that Snowden failed an internal training for NSA employees on Section 702 of surveillance law, which targets foreign Internet traffic.

Part of that training, lawmakers concluded, included privacy provisions in place to protect the rights of U.S. citizens from data collected inadvertently while the NSA vacuumed up online data.

Snowden has lived openly as a fugitive in Russia since June 2013, frequently giving interviews and appearing at conferences via video hookups.

Intelligence officials have said that material he leaked helped Russia and China protect themselves from U.S. surveillance, and taught terrorist groups such as Islamic State to better hide their tracks.

The House report is based on hundreds of secret documents and dozens of briefings with intelligence officials.

The committee concluded that Snowden is not a whistle-blower because he did not try to raise his civil liberties concerns through official channels or with Congress, and most of the data he stole from NSA computers was not related to privacy concerns.

The report does not outline specific damage to national security but lawmakers said the disclosures “exacerbated and accelerated existing trends” in the use of encrypted messages by adversaries and terrorist groups.

Lawmakers also expressed concern that intelligence officials have not done enough to prevent future thefts. The Department of Defense has reviewed all 1.5 million documents Snowden removed, but the intelligence community has not conducted such a comprehensive review.

The government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars “and will eventually spend billions” to mitigate the damage caused by the leaks, the committee concluded.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other organizations have urged Obama to pardon Snowden.

“It is indisputable that our democracy is better off thanks to Snowden, and it’s precisely for cases like his that the pardon power exists,” ACLU Director Anthony D. Romero said in a statement. “President Obama should use this power for good instead of leaving an American whistle-blower stranded in exile.”</s>A House intelligence committee report issued on Thursday condemned Edward Snowden, saying the National Security Agency leaker is not a whistleblower and accused him of leaking secrets that 'caused tremendous damage' to U.S. security.

The report also indicated that the vast majority of the documents he stole were defense secrets that had nothing to do with privacy.

The Republican-led committee released a three-page unclassified summary of its two-year bipartisan examination of how Snowden was able to remove more than 1.5 million classified documents from secure NSA networks, what the documents contained and the damage their removal caused to U.S. national security.

The committee said while the 'full scope' of damage caused by Snowden's disclosures remains unknown, a review of materials he allegedly compromised 'makes clear that he handed over secrets that protect American troops overseas and secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation-states.'

Snowden, 33, was an NSA contract employee when he took the documents and leaked them to journalists who revealed massive domestic surveillance programs begun in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

The programs collected the telephone metadata records of millions of Americans and examined emails from overseas.

Snowden fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, to avoid prosecution and now wants a presidential pardon as a whistleblower.

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the committee, said Snowden betrayed his colleagues and his country.

'He put our service members and the American people at risk after perceived slights by his superiors,' Nunes said in a statement.

'In light of his long list of exaggerations and outright fabrications detailed in this report, no one should take him at his word.

'I look forward to his eventual return to the United States, where he will face justice for his damaging crimes.'

Snowden's revelations about the agency's bulk collection of millions of Americans' phone records set off a fierce debate that pit civil libertarians concerned about privacy against more hawkish lawmakers fearful about losing tools to combat terrorism.

Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans pushed through a re-authorization of the USA Patriot Act last year that ended the program.

There was little evidence that the phone records or other surveillance programs Snowden revealed ever thwarted an attack.

Snowden is seeking a presidential pardon because he says he helped his country by revealing secret domestic surveillance programs.

Separately, all members of the committee sent a bipartisan letter to President Barack Obama urging him not to pardon Snowden.

'The vast majority of what he took has nothing to do with American privacy,' said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

'The majority of what he took has to do with military secrets and defense secrets,' Schiff said in an interview Thursday for C-SPAN's Newsmakers.

'I think that's very much at odds with the narrative that he wants to tell that he is a whistleblower.'

The Obama administration has urged Snowden to return to the U.S. and face trial.

Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi has said 'there is no question his actions have inflicted serious harms on our national security.'

Snowden was a 'disgruntled employee who had frequent conflicts with his managers,' according to the committee report.

Publicly revealing classified information does not qualify someone as a whistleblower, the report said.

The committee 'found 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 began mass downloads of classified material two weeks after he was reprimanded for engaging in a spat with NSA managers, according to the committee.

The committee also described Snowden as a 'serial exaggerator and fabricator.'

'A close review of Snowden's official employment records and submissions reveals a pattern of intentional lying,' the report said.

'He claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints.

'He claimed to have obtained a high school degree equivalent when in fact he never did. '

Snowden also claimed to have worked for the CIA as a senior adviser, when he was a computer technician, the report said.

'He also doctored his performance evaluations and obtained new positions at NSA by exaggerating his resume and stealing the answers to an employment test,' the report said.

Speaking by video link from Moscow, Snowden said on Wednesday that whistleblowing 'is democracy's safeguard of last resort, the one on which we rely when all other checks and balances have failed and the public has no idea what's going on behind closed doors.'

The 33-year-old addressed a New York City news conference where advocates from the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International announced an online petition drive to urge Obama to pardon Snowden before he leaves office.

The supporters called Snowden a hero for exposing the extent of government surveillance by giving thousands of classified documents to journalists.

Snowden insists he has not shared the full cache of 1.5 million classified documents with anyone.

However, the report notes that in June, the deputy chairman of the Russian parliament's defense and security committee publicly conceded that 'Snowden did share intelligence' with his government.

The report was released one day ahead of Friday's opening of director Oliver Stone's film Snowden, which portrays the former intelligence contractor as a whistleblower and hero.</s>WASHINGTON – A House intelligence committee report issued Thursday condemned Edward Snowden, saying the National Security Agency leaker is not a whistleblower and that the vast majority of the documents he stole were defense secrets that had nothing to do with privacy.

The Republican-led committee released a three-page unclassified summary of its two-year bipartisan examination of how Snowden was able to remove more than 1.5 million classified documents from secure NSA networks, what the documents contained and the damage their removal caused to U.S. national security.

Snowden was an NSA contract employee when he took the documents and leaked them to journalists who revealed massive domestic surveillance programs begun in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The programs collected the telephone metadata records of millions of Americans and examined emails from overseas. Snowden fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, to avoid prosecution and now wants a presidential pardon as a whistleblower.

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the committee, said Snowden betrayed his colleagues and his country.

“He put our service members and the American people at risk after perceived slights by his superiors,” Nunes said in a statement. “In light of his long list of exaggerations and outright fabrications detailed in this report, no one should take him at his word. I look forward to his eventual return to the United States, where he will face justice for his damaging crimes.”

Snowden insists he has not shared the full cache of 1.5 million classified documents with anyone. However, the report notes that in June, the deputy chairman of the Russian parliament’s defense and security committee publicly conceded that “Snowden did share intelligence” with his government.

Ben Wizner, Snowden’s attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, blasted the report, saying it was an attempt to discredit a “genuine American hero.”

“After years of investigation, the committee still can’t point to any remotely credible evidence that Snowden’s disclosures caused harm,” Wizner said. “In a more candid moment, the NSA’s former deputy director, who was directly involved in the government’s investigation, explicitly said he didn’t believe Snowden had cooperated with either China or Russia.”

Snowden’s revelations set off a fierce debate that pit civil libertarians concerned about privacy against more hawkish lawmakers fearful about losing tools to combat terrorism.

Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans pushed through a reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act last year that ended the program.

There was little evidence the phone records or surveillance programs Snowden revealed thwarted an attack.

Snowden is seeking a presidential pardon because he says he helped his country by revealing secret domestic surveillance programs. Separately, all members of the committee sent a bipartisan letter to President Barack Obama urging him not to pardon Snowden.

“The vast majority of what he took has nothing to do with American privacy,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

“The majority of what he took has to do with military secrets and defense secrets,” Schiff said in an interview for C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers.” ‘‘I think that’s very much at odds with the narrative that he wants to tell that he is a whistleblower.”

The Obama administration has urged Snowden to return to the U.S. and face trial. Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi has said “there is no question his actions have inflicted serious harms on our national security.”

The committee report says that he was a “disgruntled employee who had frequent conflicts with his managers.”

Publicly revealing classified information does not qualify someone as a whistleblower, the report said. The committee “found 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.”</s>Not aware of any conversations or communications between Snowden and the president, says White House press secretary

Edward Snowden, a former CIA contractor who leaked classified government documents is not a whistleblower, but someone who risked national security and American lives, the White House said, dimming his hopes of a presidential pardon from Barack Obama before he demits office.

“There actually is a specific process that is well-established and well-protected that allows whistleblowers to raise concerns that they have, particularly when it relates to confidential or classified information, to do so in a way that protects the national security secrets of the US. That is not what Snowden did,” Press Secretary Josh Earnest said.

“Edward Snowden is not a whistleblower,” Earnest said.

“His conduct put American lives at risk and it risked American national security. That is why the policy of the Obama administration is that Snowden should return to the US and face the very serious charges that he is facing,” he told reporters yesterday.

Snowden, 33, is accused of violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property for leaking sensitive data to the media about National Security Agency’s internet and phone surveillance.

He faces at least 30 years in jail in the US, and has been living in exile at an undisclosed location in Russia since June 2013. His residency permit expires next year.

Earnest maintained the long-held position of the US government that Snowden will be “afforded the rights that are due to every American citizen in our criminal justice system.”

“But we believe that he should return to the United States and face those charges,” he said, adding that there is no communication between Snowden and the US president.

“I’m not aware of any conversations or any communications between Snowden and the president,” he said.

Snowden, on the other hand, argues that though he leaked secret data, the information have benefited the public as they led to a improvement in privacy protection laws.

Snowden has asked Obama for clemency in an interview with a UK newspaper, saying: “If not for these disclosures, if not for these revelations, we would be worse off.”

“Yes, there are laws on the books that say one thing. But that is perhaps why the pardon power exists - for the exceptions, for the things that may seem unlawful in letters on a page but when we look at them morally, when we look at them ethically, when we look at the results, it seems these were necessary things,” he said.</s>Edward Snowden speaks via video link at a news conference in New York City on Sept. 14, 2016, and the cover art for the U.S. House report. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News, photos: Brendan McDermid/Reuters, U.S. House)

A new bipartisan report by the House Intelligence Committee depicts former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden as a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” who only began downloading highly classified documents after being reprimanded over a “workplace spat” with his bosses.

The highly damning report, which accuses Snowden of doing “tremendous damage to national security,” was released by the committee late Thursday — the day before the release of a new Oliver Stone movie about the case that portrays its subject as a courageous whistleblower who exposed frightening and illegal surveillance by the U.S. government.

It also comes the same week that Snowden’s supporters mounted a public campaign to win him a pardon from President Obama, allowing him to return from Moscow without facing a criminal prosecution that could result in years behind bars. It is a request that the White House has already rejected.

“Edward Snowden is no hero — he’s a traitor who willfully betrayed his colleagues and his country,” said Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the committee chairman. “He put our service members and the American people at risk after perceived slights by his superiors. In light of his long list of exaggerations and outright fabrications detailed in this report, no one should take him at his word.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, the panel’s ranking Democrat, told Yahoo News that the report was the product of a two-year investigation of Snowden’s conduct that uncovered new details about his theft of government documents. “I learned things, this was quite exhaustive,” Schiff said in a telephone interview. “The thing that leapt out to me — and I’m glad we can now disclose it — is that the vast majority of what he took had nothing to do with civil liberties. They were military and defense” documents, he said, that harmed national security.

Snowden’s lawyer, Ben Wizner, immediately denounced the release as a “dishonest report that attempts to discredit a genuine American hero. After years of ‘investigation,’ the committee still can’t point to any remotely credible evidence that Snowden’s disclosures caused harm,” he said. “The truth is that Edward Snowden and the journalists with whom he worked did the job that the House Intelligence Committee was supposed to do: bring meaningful oversight to the U.S. intelligence community. They did so responsibly and carefully, and their efforts have led to historic reforms.”

Glenn Greenwald, one of the first journalists to receive documents from Snowden, immediately ridiculed the report on Twitter: “BREAKING: Government officials dislike those who expose their illegal surveillance and trigger global debate about their surveillance.”

The full 36-page report by the committee remains classified, although Schiff said the panel intends to ask the office of the director of National Intelligence to declassify it so it can be made public. But a three-page executive summary released by the panel seeks to recast the narrative that has been shaped by Snowden’s supporters and is expected to gain wide exposure through the Stone movie. Significantly, however, the executive summary makes no claim that Snowden was a spy or “an agent of influence” of Russian or Chinese intelligence, as some former U.S. intelligence officials have alleged.

Perhaps the most surprising new claims in the report relate to Snowden’s work history as an NSA contractor and, before that, as a CIA employee. Snowden was “repeatedly counseled by his managers regarding his behavior at work,” the report states. It asserts that in June 2012, Snowden became involved in a “fiery email argument” with one of his supervisors about how computer updates should be managed. Snowden then copied a NSA senior executive several levels above to the email thread — “an action that earned him a swift reprimand from his contracting officer for failing to follow the proper protocol for raising grievances through the chain of command.”

It was two weeks after that, the report states, that Snowden began his massive downloading of classified documents from NSA computers. The timeline in the report would seem to undercut one of the episodes portrayed in the Stone movie: the film suggests that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s false testimony to the Senate — denying that the NSA collected information about American citizens — was among the motivations that prompted Snowden to act. (The film shows Snowden watching the testimony in disgust.) In fact, the report points out, that testimony by Clapper was given in March 2013 — nine months after Snowden began downloading his material.

The report summary also disputes Snowden’s contention that he was careful about the government documents he leaked, giving only a select portion to “responsible” journalists so they could screen them and make sure those that were released did not do any actual damage to national security. “Snowden insists he has not shared the full cache of 1.5 million classified documents with anyone; however, in June 2016, the deputy chairman of the Russian parliament’s defense and security committee public conceded that ‘Snowden did share intelligence’ with his government.” The intelligence committee has carried out multiple reviews to assess the damage caused by Snowden’s disclosures, according to the report. Even by a conservative estimate, it says, “the U.S. Government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and will eventually spend billions, to attempt to mitigate the damage Snowden caused.” Disputing Snowden’s contention that he was a whistleblower, the committee said that it “found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about U.S. intelligence activities — legal, moral, or otherwise, noting that he never took his purported concerns about government surveillance to any oversight officials within the U.S. Government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so.” (Snowden has said that he knew that any such protests over highly classified programs would have been shut down before they saw the light of day.) Finally, the report accuses Snowden of misleading his colleagues and compromising their privacy. “To gather the files he took with him when he left the country for Hong Kong… he obtained his colleagues’ security credentials through misleading means, abused his access as a systems administrator to search his co-workers’ personal drives, and removed the personally identifiable information of thousands of IC [Intelligence Community] employees and contractors,” the report states.
The U.S. House Intelligence Committee releases a summary of its two-year investigation into former NSA contractor Edward Snowden which downplays his alleged status as a whistleblower while acknowledging "tremendous damage to national security" as a result of the classified documents he stole.