Inside Washington's Quest to Bring Down Edward Snowden
By Jason Leopold
A bipartisan group of Washington lawmakers solicited details from Pentagon officials that they could use to "damage" former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's "credibility in the press and the court of public opinion."
That's according to declassified government documents obtained exclusively by VICE News in response to a long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The lawmakers' requests for information were made in December 2013 and again in February 2014, following classified briefings top officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) held for oversight committees in the House and Senate about a DIA assessment of the alleged damage to national security caused by Snowden's leak of top-secret documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Barton Gellman, and Laura Poitras.
The documents contain the most detailed information to date about the DIA's yearlong discussions with Congress about Snowden's leaks. But the 35 pages of documents do not contain any concrete examples of damage to national security because DIA redacted those details.
The documents, however, do contain a startling claim revealed here for the first time: Snowden took "over 900,000" Department of Defense (DoD) files — more documents than he downloaded from the NSA about the agency's surveillance programs, according to an undated two-page DIA report that was prepared for the head of a task force that assessed the damage caused by Snowden's leaks in advance of the official briefing the Senate Intelligence Committee. The report references a chart that provides a "breakdown" of the "data sets" Snowden took and the "locations from where they were copied." However, the DIA withheld the information on national security grounds.
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https://news.vice.com/article/exclusive-inside-washingtons-quest-to-bring-down-edward-snowden
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