It occurs to me that a side benefit of the evidence-less allegations of Donald Trump’s Russian dealings (not that he hasn’t had Russian dealings) is building the opposition to pardoning Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. It is very interesting how quickly a bunch of Democrats embraced Edward J. Eptstein’s new book as an axe to sharpen for this battle. That is the Wall Street Journal and Breitbart neo-conservative author of several analyses of the JFK assassination.
Glenn Greenwald, another controversial figure for lots of Democrats because of his criticism of President Obama, has a take on Nicholas Lemann’s review of Epstein’s book that contains many verifiable facts, unlike a lot of what is passing for reporting on the intelligence community and on Russia’s cyberwarfare capabilities and actions.
Even if one wants to argue that Snowden bears some moral responsibility for exposure of this program by virtue of having made these documents available to news outlets, it is undeniably true – to reverse Lemann’s formulation – that Snowden didn’t decide what stayed secret. The press did. As the ACLU’s Wizner simply put it about Lemann’s review: “the last lines are just false.”
(One great irony highlights this dynamic: in September, Perlroth – after exploiting Snowden’s leaks for her own benefit – argued that her own source should not be pardoned on the ground that he leaked documents “that had nothing to do with privacy violations.” But it was she, Nicole Perlroth – not Snowden – who decided to expose, on the front page of the NYT, the NSA’s spying activities on Huawei.)
