And You, You Can Be Mean -- UPDATE

And I, I'll leak all the time

Well here's a fun fact. From the South China Morning Post:

Snowden sought Booz Allen job to gather evidence on NSA surveillance

Fugitive whistle-blower reveals for first time he took job at US government contractor with the sole aim of collecting proof of spying activities

Edward Snowden secured a job with a US government contractor for one reason alone - to obtain evidence of Washington's cyberspying networks, the South China Morning Post can reveal.

For the first time, Snowden has admitted he sought a position at Booz Allen Hamilton so he could collect proof about the US National Security Agency's secret surveillance programmes ahead of planned leaks to the media.

"My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked," he told the Post on June 12. "That is why I accepted that position about three months ago."

...

Here's another fun fact.  People were asking this very question just two short weeks ago:

And if Snowden was in the Booz Allen job for just months and began copying documents "weeks" ago, did he take that job w/ a purpose?
— Joy Reid (@TheReidReport) June 10, 2013

Here's another fun fact.  Guess who repeatedly and contemptuously dismissed exactly this theory of the case whenever anyone had the temerity to point out this glaring peculiarity in the sequence of events on Mr. Snowden's resume?  (Hint: It was the one person who is currently closer to Mr. Snowden in this matter than anyone else on Earth [emphasis, surprisingly, not added]):

Completely figures that Andrew Sullivan is channeling this moronic conspiracy theory - HE WORKED AT NSA SINCE 2009!!! http://t.co/foIzTtbpZr
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 10, 2013

At the moment I don't much care if Mr. Greenwald was lying all on his own, or if he was merely repeating a lie Mr. Snowden told him, or if Mr. Greenwald was just talking out of his ass (the technical term for which is, I believe, "spouting reckless innuendo”.) The gentlemanly thing to do would be to simply apologize to Ms. Reid and Mr. Sullivan for A) being wrong and B) for being an asshole about it, which means C) don't hold your breath.

Here's another fun fact.  Back when the questions were about pedigree -- about who broke what first and who Edward Snowden's really-real BFF really was -- this was Mr. Greenwald's proud statement:

@TheStalwart The reality is that Laura Poitras and I have been working with him since February, long before anyone spoke to Bart Gellman

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 10, 2013

Now that this same timeline places him "working with" Mr., Snowden since before Mr. Snowden decided to take a gig at Booz Allen with the specific intent of stealing documents, this is Mr. Greenwald's position:

...
But Greenwald told me that when Snowden had initially contacted him, Snowden hadn’t even shared his name or where he worked — he’d simply said he had explosive documents that Greenwald (whose reporting on leak investigations and civil liberties abuses was already widely known) would want to see. At that stage, Greenwald said, their conversations only concerned how to set up an encryption system that Snowden wanted in order to facilitate private communication of documents with him. The system was not set up until several months later, Greenwald said.

It was only in May — and not before — that Snowden told him who he was, who he worked for (at that point he identified himself as affiliated with the NSA) and what sort of documents he had to share, Greenwald says. It wasn’t until June — when Greenwald visited Snowden in Hong Kong — that Snowden told him he worked specifically for Booz Allen, Greenwald adds.

And if you doubt him, well...

“Anybody who wants to accuse me or anyone at the Guardian of aiding and abetting Snowden has the obligation to point to any specific evidence to support that accusation,” Greenwald told me. “Otherwise they’re just spouting reckless innuendo.”

Wow.  

Glenn Greenwald -- a man who never hesitates to impugning the motives of anyone who does not agree with him 100% in the most venomous language he can muster -- now lectures the world about the horrors of spouting reckless innuendo.

Somebody with steadier hands than mine really needs to needlepoint this moment onto a throw pillow.

“I don’t see the significance of this at all,” Greenwald said. “He had said he had seen serious wrongdoing that he wanted to inform Americans about. He apparently wanted this last set of documents to present a complete picture.”

The sound you hear is the desperate objection -- "Inadmissible!" -- of an attorney  who just learned, in open count, in the middle of the trial, that his client has lied to him about a crucial element of the case.  

The sound you hear is the collision between the rules and tactics of jurisprudence and  very different rules and tactics of journalism. 

There is no "case" here: only a story.

There is no client: only a source.

There is no attorney/advocate: only a reporter.

There is no judge: only the public.

The sound you hear is Mr. Greenwald slamming face-first over and over again into the crucial distinctions between these two domains.

And rather than continuing to ride their Obamabot hobbyhorse into the sea (from The Daily Banter) -- 

The Obamabot Fallacy is used as a convenient and cozy shelter against cold, uncomfortable facts, not unlike the way conservatives dismiss facts they don’t like with the “liberal bias” fallacy. Don’t like the reality of evolution science? Liberal bias! Don’t like hearing that Greenwald got a fact wrong? An Obamabot wrote it therefore it must be invalid! Even though I took great care to provide respectable third party citations with links, the body of what I wrote must have been torn from White House talking points and therefore is suspicious because I’m clearly in the tank. So it gets written off. It’s all so familiar.

-- I really do wish Mr. Greenwald's supporters would convince him to stop.  Because he is still sitting on an important and consequential story and the more he lets his hectoring rage and ego off the leash the easier it becomes to dismiss that story.  

UPDATE:  From the estimable Charlie Pierce:

...
I repeat what I've said all along. Please stop giving interviews. This is the kind of fact that should have had to be dragged out of you and your lawyers in the 90th week of discovery. Instead, you just send it gift-wrapped to the people who want to chuck you into Pelican Bay for the rest of your life.

"So you were not a contractor shocked by what he'd learned and seeking to reveal it to a nation kept in the dark by its leaders, but a deliberate, premeditated saboteur, Mr. Snowden? No further questions, your honor."

Bouncing around the world while, back in this country, your entire public case gets savaged by almost everyone is one thing. Being unable to recognize your own best interest is quite another.

This is good advice.

And like so much good advice that has been air-dropped into Snowwaldia, it will not be "heeded" so much as it will be shot out of the sky.