In May 2013, a young National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden quit his job and left with portable drives full of hundreds of thousands of documents revealing details of the United States government’s foreign and domestic surveillance programs, with the intent of publicizing them.

In advance of their partial publication by The Guardian and the Washington Post, he fled to Hong Kong — a city controlled then as now by the People’s Republic of China. There, he sought to ingratiate himself with the Chinese Communists by revealing IP addresses for computers in China and Hong Kong that were being monitored by the NSA. Keeping Snowden was impossible; though already our fiercest global competitor in 2013, China was unwilling to declare itself so openly hostile. Snowden was thus allowed by the Chinese to depart for Moscow, where he remains to this day. (He became a Russian citizen in 2022.)

Edward Snowden was not a hero. Edward Snowden was a coward. He chose to violate his oath (one taken by all who are trusted with state secrets). He could have chosen to face justice for his crimes and claim the mantle of a prisoner of conscience. Instead he was willing to end up in the arms of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where he remains, in panopticon misery. The man is a traitor for those rather obvious reasons, and it should be reflexively simple for somebody interviewing to be America’s most senior intelligence official to say as much in Congress, under oath.