Russia is considering returning Edward Snowden to U.S. to gain favour with Trump

Looks like Russia is considering turning over 'US traitor' Edward Snowden as a "gift" to US President Donald Trump, who has several times in the past called the NSA leaker a "spy" and a "traitor" who deserves to be executed. According to a senior U.S. official who has analyzed a series of highly sensitive intelligence reports detailing Russian deliberations , it looks more than likely that they will turn Snowden in to the US intelligence.

Edward Snowden is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, and former contractor for the United States government, who copied and leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 without any authorization. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance, with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments.

The surveillance program revealed that the US Govt was spying on private individuals without their knowledge.
Snowden flew to Hong Kong after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii, and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill.

The disclosures made some people regard him as a traitor who needs to be jailed while others considered him a Hero for leaking the documents and exposing the Govt.'s massive surveillance on various individuals.

Snowden's ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) lawyer, Ben Wizner, told NBC News they are unaware of any plans that would send him back to the United States. He said:

"Team Snowden has received no such signals and has no new reason for concern".

Snowden responded to NBC's report on Twitter saying that it shows that he did not work with the Russian government like the US government has been claiming all along. He wrote:

"Finally: irrefutable evidence that I never cooperated with Russian intel," Snowden said. "No country trades away spies, as the rest would fear they're next."

He said he released the Govt.'s secrets independently because he wanted the American people to know what was going on within the Govt.

He also had an interview with Katie Couric where he talked more extensively about what he did, why he got asylum in Russia, why Putin refused to hand him over to the Obama Administration, how vocal he has been against the Russian government by condemning the govt's wrong doings and so on.
Watch the interview below:

Here’s what @snowden told me about the possibility of Putin handing him over as a good will gesture to the Trump administration. pic.twitter.com/LdoxE7cYvA

— Katie Couric (@katiecouric) February 10, 2017