Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appears comfortable speaking a bit more freely now that he’s no longer part of the Obama administration and said that as far as he’s concerned what NSA leaker Edward Snowden did was a “public service.” That doesn’t mean he should be treated as a hero though.
“We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,” Holder told David Axelrod, a former White House adviser who hosts The Axe Files podcast.
Before anyone could jump to any conclusion about what that means, the former attorney general clarified that legality was still an issue. “Now I would say that doing what he did—and the way he did it—was inappropriate and illegal,” Holder added in the podcast that is produced by CNN and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
“I think he harmed American interests,” Holder said. “I know there are ways in which certain of our agents were put at risk, relationships with other countries were harmed, our ability to keep the American people safe was compromised.” As far as Holder is concerned, Snowden has “broken the law” and now “needs to get lawyers, come on back and decide, see what he wants to do: Go to trial, try to cut a deal. I think there has to be a consequence for what he has done.” But that consequence could be more lenient than normal because “a judge could take into account the usefulness of having had that national debate.”
Snowden quickly noted the interview on Twitter.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald also directed Twitter followers to Holder’s interview, saying that it showed how “people so often become honest and candid only once they leave government.”
