“Absurd,” Snowden told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker yesterday. Also:

It won’t stick…. Because it’s clearly false, and the American people are smarter than politicians think they are.

It’s not just certain politicians who are pushing for a different narrative around Snowden. In The New Republic, Sean Wilentz looks at Snowden’s political beliefs (and at the beliefs of Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange) in an attempt to suggest that people don’t really know who they’re cheering for.

Among the items in Wilentz’s dossier: Snowden gave money to Ron Paul, as a lot of people already know, and allegedly (under a chat room username) pined for a return to the Gold Standard, spoke of his “NRA compatriots,” and suggested he wouldn’t mind if Social Security disappeared. But, Wilentz writes, none of these old chat room posts depict “a man with a master plan.” The master plan, he suggests, came when Snowden linked up with Greenwald and Assange—whose “connections to Putin’s regime,” Wilentz contends, “would appear to have something to do with… how and why Edward Snowden came to seek asylum in Russia.”

Eli Sanders is The Stranger's associate editor. His book, "While the City Slept," was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He once did this and once won this,...

3 replies on “Edward Snowden on Claims That He’s a Russian Spy”

  1. Really? After the first part of your post you are going to leave trip like the second part hanging out there without comment? Do you even know what writing is?

  2. Oh no, not Ron Paul. Lol, what a joke.

    Hey, you want to know what’s really interesting about this Snowden business? How about the fact that Edward Snowden turned over the entirety of his leaks, with various sources listing anything from 10,000 to 1.7 million documents and we still don’t know, to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.

    It seems that after seven months of reporting on the story, the Guardian has so far only published 1% of the files in its possession. These documents could be released in full at any time but it would seem that Greenwald is hoarding them in order to entice publishers and movie producers to bid up his projects.

    But what’s really disconcerting are details of the new journalism venture that Greenwald is entering into with billionaire eBay magnate Pierre Omidyar.

    As principal shareholder and chairman of eBay, Omidyar controls eBay’s child company, PayPal. PayPal has recently made headlines for prosecuting the so-called “PayPal 14,” the hacktivists who staged a virtual ‘sit in’ in protest of PayPal’s decision to cut off Wikileaks’ funding by organizing a Denial of Service attack on PayPal’s website. PayPal was co-founded by Max Levchin, a dedicated NSA supporter.

    Also, one of the principal investment partners with the Omidyar Network, actually sits on the board of advisors of Globant, a software company in which both the Omidyar Network and Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden’s former employer, are major shareholders. Philip Odeen, one of the Booz Allen Hamilton board members, also sits on the Board of Directors of Globant. The Omidyar Network and Booz Allen Hamilton are also both major investors in Innocentive.

    Yet somehow none of these concerns are enough for Greenwald’s most ardent supporters to even raise the question of how he is using his personal collection of leaked NSA files and who he is getting into bed with financially to do so.

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