House Intelligence Committee source claims FBI chose limited inquiry into Snowden’s 2013 defection, raising questions about possible state‑sponsored espionage and passport revocation tactics

38 were not authorized to receive them, the same charge for which Manning was convicted. Even if it went no further, the FBI would satisfy its superiors in the Department of Justice that it had done its law-enforcement job. But if it pursued the latter hypothesis, it would need to engage in a mole hunt for a quarry that might not exist. By doing so, it could open a Pandora’s Box of suspicions that it, or the NSA, might not ever be able to close. When the investigation came to this fork in the road in the summer of 2013, according to a source on the House Intelligence Committee, it chose the former route. Finally, there was the question of whether Snowden had gone to Russia by design or accident. Whenever an intelligence worker steals sensitive compartmentalized information of interest to a foreign adversary and then defect to it, it raises at least the specter of state-sponsored espionage. It is acommonly accepted presumption in counterintelligence that a spy, fearing arrest, flees to a country that has some reason to offer him protection. When the British spies Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby, for example, fled to Moscow in the Cold War the presumption was that they had a prior intelligence connection with Russia. And Philby confirmed it in his 1968 memoir “My Silent War.” So in the case of Snowden, counterintelligence had to consider the possibility that his theft of state secrets and his arrival in Moscow might not be totally coincidental. For his part, Snowden said that he did not leave Hong Kong with the intention of staying in Russia, but that the U.S. government “trapped him” at Moscow’s Airport by revoking his passport. He told editor of The Nation magazine: “I’m in exile. My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me exiled.” He added that the U.S. government “chose to keep me in Russia.” Although he repeated that assertion over a dozen times, it was untrue. The US government had not invalidated his passport for travel back to the United States. When criminal charges are lodged against a U.S, citizen by the Department of Justice, the State Department, in accordance with the U.S. code of justice, marks in the electronic passport validation advisory system that that person’s passport is electronically marked valid only for return to the U.S. After criminal charges were filed against Snowden, including the theft of classified government documents, it advised foreign governments that Snowden was wanted on felony charges, and “should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the United States." It was simply requiring that his passport, which is a State Department document, be used for him to return to the United States. Rather than preventing Snowden from returning to the United States, or “exiling” him, the government facilitated his return home. With his passport, he could have flown home from either Hong Kong or Moscow, where he, like any other person accused of a felony, would face the charges against him. Nor was it plausible that President Obama and Secretary Of State Clinton would conspire to trap a perpetrator carrying incredibly valuable national security secrets in Russia. The counterintelligence investigation had little difficulty establishing that Snowden’s trapped” version in the media was not consistent with the actual chronology of the events. Snowden claimed that the U.S. State Department had acted while the plane was flying to Moscow on June HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020190