Snowden Interview on German Television

This interview was shown in Germany on the world's second largest publicly funded broadcast network, ARD.

The interviewer notes that President Obama has said that Snowden has been charged with three felonies. The President went on to say, "if you, Edward Snowden, believe in what you did, you should come back to America and appear before the court with your lawyer and make your case."

To this in the interview Snowden replies, "It’s interesting because he mentions three felonies. What he doesn’t say is that the crimes that he’s charged me with are crimes that don’t allow me to make my case; they don’t allow me to defend myself in an open court to the public and convince a jury that what I did was to their benefit.

The Espionage Act … was never intended to prosecute journalistic sources, people who are informing the newspapers about information that is in the public interest. It was intended for people who are selling documents in secret to foreign governments, who are bombing bridges, who are sabotaging communications, not for people who are serving the public good. So it’s,

I would say illustrative, that the president would choose to say that someone should face the music when he knows that the music is a show trial."