Edward Snowden, dollar millionaire

Edward Snowden, long-time resident of Moscow, has been called a lot of things since he removed thousands and thousands of top secret secrets from his employer, the US National Security Agency, seven years ago and spilled the secret beans to all and sundry. Every secret, big and small, was splashed all over the papers and on television and radio around the world. It was a massive leaking of classified material, the biggest ever. He hopped quickly to Hong Kong to hand over his treasure-trove to journalists before heading for Moscow which welcomed him with open arms. So since then he has been called a traitor, a whistleblower, a blaggard, a freedom of speech hero, an enemy of the state (US state) etc etc. You take your choice. Mine has always been that, whatever positive achievements his treachery may have brought about in the sense of reducing the mighty NSA's powers to eavesdrop and snoop on everyone from American citizens to Angela Merkel, he still stole a vast stock of highly classified material from his government employers and therefore betrayed their trust in him. What he did was against the law. It was therefore a crime, alleged or otherwise. But now we learn that he has also made a lot of money from his betrayal. Court documents have revealed that he is a dollar millionaire from all the fees he has been charging for speaking engagements from Moscow, and also of course the royalties from his book. The US government is trying to grab the profits he has made on the basis that if he committed a federal crime he shouldn't benefit financially from his wrongdoing. This is where the documents have emerged. There has been a long-running court case to deprive him of these profits. Here are a few examples: $50,000 for speaking to a Hong Kong brokerage firm called CLSA in 2015, $25,000 from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and $32,000 to a Portuguese tourism office. I presume his speeches to these various organisations were full of anecdotes about how he got all the stuff out of the NSA one dark night and how he saved the US and the world from the nasty American eavesdropping satellites. That's a lot of money for boasting about his alleged achievements. I'm not a fan, never have been and never will be. The court documents show he has made $1.2 million since exiting the US and American federal lawyers want it handed over. All of which stands in contrast to an extraordinary statement by President Trump the other day when he said he might consider pardoning Snowden. Does he think that will win him votes? I guess it might. But the US intelligence community will surely fight that tooth and nail? Bloody hell, he'll get a Nobel Prize next!!