(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. “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. 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. 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. 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. “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. 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. 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.)
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.