.@IamJohnOliver grills Edward Snowden in surprisingly contentious @LastWeekTonight interview: http://t.co/rF3GB3zCwq pic.twitter.com/102F5QzLTR

— Marlow Stern (@MarlowNYC) April 6, 2015

Oliver didn’t pull any punches. “How many of those documents have you actually read?” he asked Snowden with a palpable air of skepticism. “I do understand what I turned over,” the ex-CIA systems admin mumbled.

Not good enough. “There’s a difference between understanding what’s in the documents and reading what’s in the documents… because when you’re handing over thousands of NSA documents the last thing you’d want to do is read them,” Oliver said.

He continued, “So the New York Times took a slide, didn’t redact it properly, and in the end it was possible for people to see that something was being used in Mosul on al Qaeda.”

“That is a problem,” Snowden replied.

“Well, that’s a fuckup,” said Oliver.

“It is a fuckup, and those things do happen in reporting. In journalism, we have to accept that some mistakes will be made. This is a fundamental concept of liberty,” Snowden said.

“Right. But you have to own that then,” grilled Oliver. “You’re giving documents with information you know could be harmful, which could get out there.”

Snowden is stunned to near-silence, not expecting such a contentious line of questioning from the bespectacled late-night host.