Snowden's Claims of Destroying NSA Files Raise Questions About Evidence and Potential Intelligence Leak

141 served the public good. The government might not be able to contest his claim without further revealing NSA sources. Under these circumstances, it might be induced to agree to a plea bargain for Snowden. Changing the narrative would also help enhance his public image as a whistle- blower, Whatever the reasoning that led to it, Snowden’s new narrative was that he had destroyed all the documents he had in his possession before coming to Moscow and had no access to any NSA documents, not even those that he had distributed to journalists. Snowden reinforced this narrative in almost in a series f interviews arranged by Wizner. In December 2013, he met with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post. It was his first face-to- face meeting with a journalist since he had arrived in Russia in June. To advance his narrative , Snowden turned on his laptop to Gellman and, as if proving his point, said to him “there’s nothing on it... my hard drive is completely blank.” That his computer had no files stored on it actually meant very little. The files could have been transferred to another device, or, as was discussed earlier, to a server in the cloud. Gellman probed further by asking the precise whereabouts of the files, but, as he reported, Snowden declined to answer that question. All that he would say was that he was “confident he did not expose them to Chinese intelligence in Hong Kong.” Since that answer did not nail down the issue, Wizner arranged for Vanity Fair, which was preparing an article on Snowden, to submit questions. In his reply to them, Snowden wrote s that he destroyed all his files in Hong Kong because he didn’t want to risk bringing them to Russia. He expanded on this claim in three more interviews arranged by Wizner. These interviews were with three journalists who themselves had opposed NSA surveillance: James Bamford writing for Wired magazine, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian and Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation. He also gave a televised interview to Brian Williams of NBC News in which he explained that since he had no access to the NSA documents in Russia, he could not provide access to the Russians even if they “break my fingers.” Snowden did he specify where, when or how the putative destruction of the files occurred, and offered no witnesses or evidence, other than a blank laptop screen to corroborate it. Even though his new narrative was widely accepted by the media, a self-serving claim by a perpetrator that files have been destroyed cannot be accepted at face value in a digital age in which files can be copied to another computer or moved to the “cloud” with the click of a key,. After all Snowden went to considerable risk to select, copy, and steal these Level 3 documents in mid-May before leaving Hawaii for Hong Kong. They were the last medium of value he held in Hong Kong. These secrets were his potential bargaining chips. Why would he simply erase them in June in Hong Kong? It is also difficult for me to accept that he would destroy these documents because he feared the Russians might get them. If he was so concerned about the ability of Russian intelligence, he could have stayed in Hong Kong and fought extradition instead of flying to Russia. Once he made his arrangements to go to Russia, he must have realized that even without the files on his computer, the Russian intelligence service could still obtain the NSA secrets he held in his head. Indeed, as he told the New York Times, the secrets he held in his head would have devastating consequences for NSA operations. In light of Kucherena statement that Snowden had access to NSA documents in Russia, it would require some form of a suspension of disbelief to accept Snowden’s new narrative. But even if one was willing to accept his erasure claim, it still would not mean that the NSA documents had not fallen into the hands of adversaries. If he had destroyed all of the electronic copies of the NSA’s data before boarding his flight to Moscow, he could he be “100 percent” certain, as he claimed that the data had not been accessed HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020293