Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that she “can never condone” the theft and subsequent leaks of classified files by Edward Snowden, who has been hailed by some as a whistleblower for exposing the breadth of National Security Agency spying.
When asked during an interview with Re/Code’s Kara Swisher whether Snowden is a “traitor,” Clinton stopped short of using that word — but expressed her opposition to his actions.
“I can never condone what he did,” Clinton said. “He stole millions of documents, and the great irony is the vast majority of those documents had nothing to do with civil liberties.” After leaking the documents, Clinton noted, Snowden sought asylum in China and Russia.
The documents obtained by Snowden, which he supplied to reporter Glenn Greenwald, showed that the NSA had secretly obtained Americans’ phone records, hacked into Google and Yahoo data centers, and spied on world leaders, among other revelations. The leaks sparked intense debate in Congress over the latitude that should be granted to intelligence agencies, and whether the NSA in particular had infringed on Americans’ privacy.
Clinton was interviewed following a speech to the Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women, for which she was paid $300,000, according to reports.
