HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019208.jpg

For example, in October 2014, he told the editor of the Nation, “I’m in exile. My
government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me exiled” and “chose to keep me
in Russia.” According to Mr. Snowden, the U.S. government accomplished this
entrapment by suspending his passport while he was in midair after he departed Hong
Kong on June 23, thus forcing him into the hands of President Vladimir Putin’s regime.
None of this is true. The State Department invalidated Mr. Snowden’s passport while he
was still in Hong Kong, not after he left for Moscow on June 23. The “Consul General-
Hong Kong confirmed that Hong Kong authorities were notified that Mr. Snowden’s
passport was revoked June 22,” according to the State Department’s senior watch officer,
as reported by ABC news on June 23, 2013.
Mr. Snowden could not have been unaware of the government’s pursuit of him, since the
criminal complaint against him, which was filed June 14, had been headline news in
Hong Kong. That the U.S. acted against him while he was still in Hong Kong is of great
importance to the timeline because it points to the direct involvement of Aeroflot, an
airline which the Russian government effectively controls. Aeroflot bypassed its normal
procedures to allow Mr. Snowden to board the Moscow flight—even though he had
neither a valid passport nor a Russian visa, as his newly assigned lawyer, Anatoly
Kucherena,said at a press conference in Russia on July 12, 2013.
By falsely claiming his passport was invalidated after the plane departed Hong Kong—
instead of before he left—Mr. Snowden hoped to conceal this extraordinary waiver. The
Russian government further revealed its helping hand, judging by a report in Russia’s
Izvestia newspaper when, on arrival, Mr. Snowden was taken off the plane by a security
team in a “special operation.”
Nor was it any kind of accident. Vladimir Putin personally authorized this assistance after
Mr. Snowden met with Russian officials in Hong Kong, as Mr. Putin admitted in a
televised press conference on Sept. 2, 2013.
To provide a smokescreen for Mr. Snowden’s escape from Hong Kong, WikiLeaks (an
organization that the Obama administration asserted to be a tool of Russian intelligence
after the hacking of Democratic Party leaders’ email in 2016) booked a dozen or more
diversionary flight reservations to other destinations for Mr. Snowden.
WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange also dispatched Sarah Harrison, his deputy at
WikiLeaks, to fly to Hong Kong to pay Mr. Snowden’s expenses and escort him to
Moscow. In short, Mr. Snowden’s arrival in Moscow was neither accidental nor the work
of the U.S. government.
Mr. Snowden’s own narrative asserts that he came to Russia not only empty-handed but
without access to any of the stolen material. He wrote in Vanity Fair in 2014 that he had
destroyed all of it before arriving in Moscow—the very data that he went to such lengths
to steal a few weeks earlier in Hawaii.
As it turns out, this claim is also untrue. It is belied by two Kremlin insiders who were in
a position to know what Mr. Snowden actually brought with him to Moscow. One of
them, Frants Klintsevich, was the first deputy chairman of the defense and security
committee of the Duma (Russia’s parliament) at the time of Mr. Snowden’s defection.
“Let’s be frank,” Mr. Klintsevich said in a taped interview with NPR in June 2016, “Mr.
Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security services do.”
The other insider was Anatoly Kucherena, a well-connected Moscow lawyer and Mr.
Putin’s friend. Mr. Kucherena served as the intermediary between Mr. Snowden and

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019208