In Declassified Edward Snowden Report, Committee Walks Back Claims About 'Intentional Lying'

The House Intelligence Committee in September issued a three-page document alerting the public that information from its two-year investigation of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden had turned up evidence that Snowden was a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” who exhibited a “pattern of intentional lying.”

The executive summary of the committee’s report on Snowden was released one day after large advocacy groups launched a campaign asking President Barack Obama for a pardon, arguing Snowden's leaks about mass surveillance were in the public interest.

The committee's message was clear: a pardon would be undeserved, as Snowden arguably harmed national security and did so while falsely portraying himself as a whistleblower, when in fact he was a habitual liar and a disgruntled employee.

On Thursday the committee released the underlying and mostly declassified 33-page report on Snowden’s actions, and some accusations the committee presented as facts in September are couched with far from conclusive language.

The previously released summary stated without qualification or footnotes that Snowden “claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints. He claimed to have obtained a high school degree equivalent when in fact he never did.”

The two claims are not offered as facts in the full report.

The report supports the "shin splints" theory with just one piece of evidence, saying "An NSA security official the Committee interviewed took a different view [about Snowden's legs], telling Committee staff that Snowden was discharged after suffering from 'shin splints,' a common overuse injury."

A footnote at the bottom of the page says: "If untreated, shin splints can progress into stress fractures, but the Committee found no evidence that Snowden was involved in a training accident."

The report says in support of its claim about Snowden's lack of a high school degree equivalent that "nothing the Committee found indicates" he earned a General Education Diploma (GED) after dropping out of high school.

"To the contrary," the report offers as evidence, "on an applicant resume submitted to NSA in 2012, Snowden indicated that he graduated from 'Maryland High School' in 2001; earlier, in 2006, Snowden had posted on a public web forum that he did not 'have a degree of ANY type. I don't even have a high school diploma.'"

A footnote says, however, that "[o]ne of Snowden's associates claims to have reviewed official educational records that demonstrate Snowden's passage of a high school equivalency test and receipt of high school equivalency diploma in June 2004. Any receipt of such a diploma in 2004 stands in tension with Snowden's 2006 claim to not have a 'degree of any type [or] ... even a high school diploma"; and with his 2012 resume, which stated that he either left or graduated from 'Maryland High School' in 2001."

The Snowden "associate" is three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman, who rebutted executive summary claims in a blog post, writing that Snowden's military discharge paperwork listed a diagnosis of "bilateral tibial stress fractures" and that he reviewed a copy of Snowden's GED test report, printing what he said was Snowden's test score and diploma number.

Gellman reported many significant scoops from Snowden-leaked documents for the Washington Post and is working on a book about his source, who currently lives in Russia. U.S. News was unable to confirm Gellman's rebuttal, as two of Snowden’s attorneys said they did not possess the documents and the relevant government agencies said privacy rules kept them from providing the medical and educational records.

"I've clearly staked my reputation on this," Gellman told U.S. News at the time. "I think all this debate about shin splints and GED is a silly diversion (trifling, I wrote), but I couldn't resist the irony of lying about the evidence of lying."

A House Intelligence Committee staff member tells U.S. News the footnotes were added after publication of the executive summary to acknowledge contrary information.

The staffer says the added footnotes do not undermine the report's overall findings.

"We don’t think it undermines the credibility of the report – we’re trying to be open about any conflicting information," the staffer says. "We did not have reason to believe he would untruthfully downplay his own education credentials. On the shin splints, one can split hairs between shin splints and stress fractures, but either one of those is a far cry from the account being put forward by Snowden’s supporters – such as the Snowden movie trailer, where a doctor supposedly tells him that if he lands on his legs again they will 'turn to powder.'"

The full report nonetheless was condemned by Snowden attorney Jesselyn Radack as an "attempted hit job." Radack wrote on Twitter that the committee "is as good at chasing unicorns trying [to] smear Snowden as it is at overseeing the [intelligence community]."

Radack tweeted a screenshot from the report that underpinned a separate allegation of deception from the executive summary. The report alleged Snowden "modified CIA's performance review software in connection with his annual performance review, by manipulating the font." (The summary had said he had "doctored his performance evaluations.") For this and other allegations in the report, there's not enough context to evaluate the significance.