Edward Snowden’s appearance on a televised call-in show with Russian President Vladimir Putin prompted renewed questions Thursday over the National Security Agency leaker’s relationship with the Russian government. Journalist Glenn Greenwald didn’t let those questions go unanswered.
David Frum, the former George W. Bush speechwriter and senior editor at The Atlantic, tweeted a photo of Joseph Stalin and a little girl and mockingly described it as a “[h]eartwarming photo of Edward Snowden speaking to Vladimir Putin.”
Frum has long been critical of the Snowden revelations, but even some of the former government contractor’s supporters were also uncomfortable with the appearance on Putin’s show.
Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce, who’s often written positively about the “Snowden Effect,” disapproved of the appearance.
“If you’re trying to convince people that you are a disinterested seeker of truth who happens to be in Moscow because of a variety of very strange circumstances…and that you are not operating too closely with the current Russian regime, having Vladimir Putin get publicly chummy with you, spy-to-spy, is really not the way to make your case,” Pierce wrote Thursday on his blog.
Greenwald, the newly minted Pulitzer Prize winner who has reported extensively on the NSA disclosures, has spent months staving off criticism of Snowden’s temporary asylum in Russia.
On both Twitter and cable news, Greenwald has mowed down those who have accused Snowden of being in cahoots with Putin.
Journalist Tom Ricks said last month that he’s “beginning to believe the worst” about Greenwald and Snowden. When Ricks tried repeatedly to get Greenwald to denounce Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, Greenwald turned the tables on his critic.
“Tom Ricks hasn’t condemned corporate waste dumping in East Africa; by his standards, this means he’s probably in cahoots with the polluters and profiteering off of it,” Greenwald told TPM in an email.
Greenwald didn’t respond to TPM’s request for comment on Thursday, but he took to Twitter to mock the “brave patriotic critics” going after Snowden.
Snowden should storm the Kremlin, take their surveillance docs & demand to be sent to the US: just like his brave patriotic critics would do
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 17, 2014
