Moscow lawyer Anatoly Kucherena claims Snowden retained a second set of NSA documents after arriving in Russia

137 An answer came three months later from his Moscow lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena. On September 23, 2013, Kucherena had an extensive interviewed on the state owned RT channel. The interviewer Sophie Shevardnadze, who had a show on RT Television, called “Sophie & Co,” was well-admired journalist in her own right. She is also the grand-daughter of Edward Shevardnadze, a former foreign minister and Politburo member of the Soviet Union and, after the Soviet Union broke up, the first president of Georgia. Even though she had interviewed many top political figures in Russia, obtaining an hour-long interview with Kucherena was a coup since, up until then, he had not discussed the subject in Snowden in a television interview. About half-way through the interview, she brought up a highly-sensitive subject of the disposition of the NSA documents. She directly asked Kucherena if Snowden given all the documents he had taken from the NSA to journalists in Hong Kong. If anyone was in a position to know about these documents, it was Kucherena. He had acted as an intermediary for Snowden in his negotiations with Russian authorities, including the FSB. As such, he would be privy to the status of the secret material that was of immense concern to the Russian intelligence services. When I interviewed Kucherena in Moscow in 2015, he told me that “all the reports” concerning Snowden had been turned over to him by “Russian authorities” in July 2013. “I had all of Snowden’s statements,” he said. If so, he presumably knew what Snowden had told the Russian security services prior Had Snowden come to Russia with empty hands or bearing gifts? Kucherena answered her question without any evasion. He said that Snowden had only given “some” of the NSA’s documents in his possession to journalists in Hong Kong. He had kept the remaining documents in his possession. That confirmed what Snowden had told Greenwald. Poitras and Lam in Hong Kong. Snowden told them that he had divided the stolen NSA documents into two separate sets of documents. One set he gave to Poitras and Greenwald on thumb drives. The other set, which he told them that he considered too sensitive for these journalists, he retained for himself. As late as July 14, 2013, Greenwald told the Associated Press that Snowden held back documents and “Is in possession of literally thousands of documents ... that would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it." One issue for U.S. investigators at the NSA, CIA and Department of Defense was what Snowden did with the second set afer his meetings with the journalists in Hong Kong. Did he take these documents with him to Russia? Shevardnadze, who makes it a point to drill her interviewees, pressed Kucherena as to whether Snowden still had these NSA files, or “material” in Russia. The dialogue went as follows (from the transcript supplied to me by Shevardnadze.) Shevardnadze: So he [Snowden] does have some materials that haven’t been made public yet? Kucherena: Certainly. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020289