ACLU Lawyer Ben Wizner Discussed Potential Amnesty Deal for Edward Snowden with Russian Attorney

140 When I later asked Kucherena in Moscow why Snowden changed his story in direct contradiction of what Kucherena had stated, he said “Wizner.” He was referring to Ben Wizner, a top-drawer ACLU lawyer based in Washington D.C. Wizner had joined the ACLU in August 2001 after graduating NYU law school and clerking for a Federal judge. At the ACLU, he became an effective foe of NSA surveillance. “I had spent ten years before this [Snowden leak] trying to bring lawsuits against the intelligence community,” he explained in an interview with Forbes in 2014. Prior to the Snowden leak, he had been consulted frequently by Poitras on government surveillance issues (and appeared in Poitras’ 2010 documentary “The Oath.”) He had also been engaged in a law suit aimed at exposing the NSA’s subpoenas for Verizon records. He had first learned about Snowden in early 2013, while Snowden was still working for the NSA, from Poitras. At that time, Poitras did not know Snowden’s real name, but she revealed to Wizner that she had found an anonymous source with access to U.S. government surveillance secrets. So he was not completely surprised when Glenn Greenwald, Poitras’ writing partner, asked him in July 2013 to contact Snowden in Russia. Snowden offered an opportunity for Wizner since the ACLU already had been pursuing a suit in Federal court against the government’s seizure of Verizon’s billing records. If he could induce Snowden to retain him and the ACLU, he could claim standing in Federal court to represent Snowden in the case. He also fully believed in the salutary benefit of Snowden’s revelations. They communicated over Skype, according to Kucherena. When they discussed Snowden’s legal situation in America, Snowden expressed an interest in obtaining some form of amnesty from prosecution in America. Wizner was willing to attempt to explore making a possible deal with the Department of Justice, but it would not be an easy task, especially if Snowden had turned over NSA documents to a foreign power. Even to argue that Snowden was merely a NSA whistle-blower presented a serious challenge for Wizner. The ACLU had been involved with three previous NSA whistle-blowers, William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake, and Russell D. Tice, but Snowden’s case differed from those cases in an important ways. Binney, Drake, and Tice had not intentionally taken any NSA documents. Snowden, on the other hand, had not only taken a large NSA documents but released tens of thousands of these top secret files to journalists based in Germany and Brazil as well as other unauthorized recipients. In addition, the Whistle Blower Protection Act, passed by Congress in 1989, does not exempt an insider who signs a secrecy oath, such as Snowden, from the legal consequences of disclosing classified documents to journalists or other unauthorized persons. Consequently, getting some form of amnesty for Snowden required changing Snowden’s public image from that of a person who had damaged America to an image of a person who had helped America. But if Snowden had taken even a single top secret document to Russia, the case could be made that he had stolen communications intelligence secrets with intent to damage the United States, which under the law could be considered espionage. In this regard, Kucherena’s disclosure was extremely damaging to Snowden’s position. One way to mitigate the damage from it was for Snowden to substitute a new narrative. In it, he would say to say to hand-picked journalists that he had given all his documents to Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong and took none of them to Russia, Wizner could then argue that documents such as the FISA warrant were improperly classified secret and that disclosing them HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020292