By RAPHAEL SATTER
within a few hours of one another, but Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said the papers’ appeals weren’t coordinated ahead of time.
“Complete coincidence,” he said in an email. He credited the legal reverses suffered by the NSA’s domestic dragnet, the spying reforms suggested by Obama’s privacy review team and Silicon Valley companies’ recent summit at the White House with bringing things to a head.
“We both had the same thought — that, after the rather extraordinary events just before Xmas … it (would) be (good) to say something at year end,” he said.
Snowden is currently residing in Russia following an abortive attempt to travel to Latin America, where he’d been offered asylum. He faces espionage charges in connection with his leaks, which U.S. officials have described as damaging or even life-threatening, but talk of amnesty has been circulating for several weeks after the idea was first floated by senior NSA official Rick Leggett.
Asked about the proposal in his year-end press conference on Dec. 20, Obama didn’t explicitly rule it out, and at least one former member of the intelligence community suggested the idea had some traction. Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former chief of Britain’s MI5, recently told the BBC she expected “some kind of deal” for Snowden — although she was careful to note that she was simply speculating.
A legal analyst who has followed the Snowden saga said he doubted the amnesty talk would amount to much.
The newspaper editorials have “approximately zero percent chance of moving the Justice Department off its position,” said writer Jeffrey Toobin, a former federal prosecutor and a critic of Snowden’s disclosures.
Toobin also noted that both papers have relied on Snowden as a source for stories on the NSA. The Guardian has done so directly, through journalist Glenn Greenwald, and The New York Times indirectly, thanks to a deal the Guardian struck with the paper back in July.
“We as journalists have a special solicitude for our sources,” he said.
U.S. officials did not immediately return calls seeking comment Thursday. Snowden’s Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, could not immediately be reached.
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Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed to this report.
