Report clears Snowden of ‘whistle-blower’ tag

The Republican-led committee released a three-page unclassified summary of its two-year bipartisan examination on Thursday, which details how Snowden was able to remove the documents from secure NSA networks, what information the documents contained, and the damage their removal caused to US national security. California Congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said the investigation revealed that the vast majority of what Snowden took had nothing to do with American privacy. 

“The majority of what he took has to do with military secrets and defence secrets,” Schiff said in an interview for C-SPAN’s Newsmakers. ‘‘I think that’s very much at odds with the narrative that he wants to tell that he is a whistle-blower.” In a series of tweets, Snowden dismissed the report as “artlessly distorted” and a “serious act of bad faith.”

Meanwhile, a Swedish appeals court on Friday upheld an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over a 2010 rape accusation, rejecting his request to have it lifted. The court announced in a statement that Assange “is still detained in absentia”, adding that it “shares the assessment of the (lower) district court that Julian Assange is still suspected on probable cause of rape... and that there is a risk that he will evade legal proceedings or a penalty.”

The 45-year-old Australian has been holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since June 2012, seeking refuge there after exhausting all his legal options in Britain against extradition to Sweden. Assange has refused to travel to Stockholm for questioning over the rape allegation, which he denies, due to concerns Sweden will extradite him to the US over WikiLeaks’ release of 500,000 secret military files on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.