re: #26 Lidane

*cough* BULLSHIT *cough*

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He didn’t come up with it all on his own. He had help.

That New Yorker interview includes a fascinating bit of slight of hand by Mayer. So an encrypted IM chat with maybe-Snowden falls into your lap. It occurs to you that it’s important for him to address the HK Russian consulate claims, but for that one question, you make a bizarre editorial decision and ask it to a lawyer at the ACLU instead???

newyorker.com

Some observers, looking at the possibility that Snowden was in league with the Russian government before taking asylum there, have pointed to a report in a Russian newspaper, Kommersant, that before leaving Hong Kong last June Snowden stayed at the Russian consulate. Snowden’s legal adviser, Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, denied that report, however, saying, “Every news organization in the world has been trying to confirm that story. They haven’t been able to, because it’s false.”

You then fail to follow up Wizner’s statement with some of those media attempts to confirm the Kommersant story? For example:

buzzfeed.com

In an interview with Russian state TV and the Associated Press published early Wednesday, Putin confirmed a report — denied by both Snowden’s camp and Fidel Castro — in Kommersant that Snowden had appealed to Russian diplomats in Hong Kong for help after the U.S. sought to extradite him. Putin insisted, however, that he did not know that Snowden was flying to Russia two days later until two hours before he boarded the plane to Moscow.