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How Nancy Pelosi Saved the NSA Surveillance Program (+video)

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Photo Credit: FPBy John Hudson

The obituary of Rep. Justin Amash’s amendment to claw back the sweeping powers of the National Security Agency has largely been written as a victory for the White House and NSA chief Keith Alexander, who lobbied the Hill aggressively in the days and hours ahead of Wednesday’s shockingly close vote. But Hill sources say most of the credit for the amendment’s defeat goes to someone else: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It’s an odd turn, considering that Pelosi has been, on many occasions, a vocal surveillance critic.

Ahead of the razor-thin 205-217 vote, which would have severely limited the NSA’s ability to collect data on Americans’ telephone records if passed, Pelosi privately and aggressively lobbied wayward Democrats to torpedo the amendment, a Democratic committee aid with knowledge of the deliberations tells The Cable.

“Pelosi had meetings and made a plea to vote against the amendment and that had a much bigger effect on swing Democratic votes against the amendment than anything Alexander had to say,” said the source, keeping in mind concerted White House efforts to influence Congress by Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “Had Pelosi not been as forceful as she had been, it’s unlikely there would’ve been more Democrats for the amendment.”

With 111 liberal-to-moderate Democrats voting for the amendment alongside 94 Republicans, the vote in no way fell along predictable ideological fault lines. And for a particular breed of Democrat, Pelosi’s overtures proved decisive, multiple sources said.

“Pelosi had a big effect on more middle-of-the road hawkish Democrats who didn’t want to be identified with a bunch of lefties [voting for the amendment],” said the aide. “As for the Alexander briefings: Did they hurt? No, but that was not the central force, at least among House Democrats. Nancy Pelosi’s political power far outshines that of Keith Alexander’s.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: The BlazeA different amendment restricting NSA spying was passed overwhelmingly by the House – but ‘no one is talking about it’

By Jason Howerton

While the most talked-about news out of the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday was the defeat of the so-called Amash amendment that would have defunded the NSA’s massive data collection program, another amendment related to NSA spying was quietly passed overwhelmingly by lawmakers.

The Pompeo amendment (championed by Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas) passed the House with a bipartisan vote of 409-12. However, “no one is talking about it,” Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) told TheBlaze on Thursday.

The amendment that passed is reportedly intended to “ensure none of the funds may be used by the NSA to target a U.S. person or acquire and store the content of a U.S. person’s communications, including phone calls and e-mails.”

In contrast, the Amash amendment sought to “end authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act. It would also bar the NSA and other agencies from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect records, including telephone call records, that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215.”

Culberson told TheBlaze in a phone interview why he supported the Pompeo amendment over the more sweeping amendment authored by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.). Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsFox News Poll: Voters concerned NSA can’t keep a secret

By Dana Blanton

Voters think the National Security Agency surveillance program is more likely to hurt than protect law-abiding Americans. They are also concerned the agency can’t keep its own secrets secret.

That’s according to a Fox News poll released Thursday — a day after the U.S. House voted down legislation that would have stopped the NSA from collecting the phone records of millions of Americans.

By a 47-41 percent margin, more voters think the government’s electronic surveillance program does more to hurt Americans by using their private info improperly than it does to help track down terrorists and protect Americans.

The number of Democrats who believe the NSA’s efforts are more likely to help catch terrorists (52 percent) is matched by the number of Republicans who think it will hurt everyday Americans (52 percent). More than 7 in 10 voters who are part of the Tea Party movement say the tracking is more likely to hurt Americans (72 percent). Read more from this story HERE.


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Photo Credit: J Scott ApplewhiteNSA amendment’s narrow defeat spurs privacy advocates for surveillance fight

By Spencer Ackerman and Paul Lewis

The razor-thin defeat of a congressional measure to rein in domestic surveillance galvanized civil libertarians on Thursday for what they expect to be a drawn-out political and legal struggle to clip the wings of the intelligence apparatus in the US.

While a measure by Representative Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, failed in the House on Wednesday night, the tight vote was the closest that privacy advocates have come since 9/11 to stopping the National Security Agency from collecting Americans’ data in bulk.

Members of Congress, liberties groups and former surveillance officials pointed to a variety of measures, from new legislation in both the Senate and House to court cases, as means to reset the much-contested balance between liberty and security in the US over the coming weeks and months.

“There are many voices concerned in the Senate about this same issue,” said J Kirk Wiebe, a former senior NSA analyst turned whistleblower. “It doesn’t mean it’s the end of it. It’s the beginning.”

Aides to congressman James Sensenbrenner, the Wisconsin Republican who wrote the Patriot Act, told the Guardian on Thursday that he plans to introduce legislation through the House judiciary committee that would restrict the NSA’s bulk surveillance of Americans’ phone records.

“Yesterday’s amendment was only a first step in what will be a long debate,” said Sensenbrenner spokesman Ben Miller. Read more from this story HERE.

House Rejects Bid to Curb Spy Agency Data Collection

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Photo Credit: Reuters/NSABy David Alexander. A U.S. spy program that sweeps up vast amounts of electronic communications survived a legislative challenge in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, the first attempt to curb the data gathering since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed details of its scope.

The House of Representatives voted 217-205 to defeat an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that would have limited the National Security Agency’s ability to collect electronic information, including phone call records.

Opposition to government surveillance has created an unlikely alliance of libertarian Republicans and some Democrats in Congress, The House vote split the parties, with 94 Republicans in favor and 134 against, while 111 Democrats supported the amendment and 83 opposed it.

The White House and senior intelligence officials opposed the amendment by Republican Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, which had been prompted by Snowden’s revelations. Snowden, a fugitive from the United States, has been holed up at a Moscow airport for the past month unable to secure asylum.

The House later approved the defense appropriations bill, which included nearly $600 billion in Pentagon spending for the 2014 fiscal year, including the costs of the Afghanistan war. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesAmericans Have Completely Flipped On Edward Snowden In The Past Month

By Brett Logiurato. The American public’s views of National Security Agency leak source Edward Snowden have flipped in the past month, according to one poll — and now most support him being charged with a crime.

According to the ABC-Washington Post poll, 53% say that Snowden should be charged with a crime after exposing a trove of NSA secrets, compared with 36% who disagree. That’s a sharp turn from the point immediately after his revelations in June, when Americans opposed him being charged by a 48-43 margin.

Snowden is currently in Russia, where he is reportedly being allowed to leave the Moscow airport transit zone in which he has been stationed for the past month. Read more from this story HERE.

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Poll: Majority more worried U.S. surveillance goes too far

By Mark Murray. More than a month after leaker Edward Snowden revealed information about the National Security Agency’s surveillance and data-gathering programs, 55 percent of Americans say they’re more worried the United States will go too far in violating privacy rights, according to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Click here for full poll results (pdf)

That’s a significant shift from the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when an equal number in the Dec. 2001 NBC/WSJ poll — 55 percent — worried more that the United States wouldn’t go far enough in monitoring potential terrorists who live in the U.S.

The last time the poll asked this question, in July 2006, Americans were split, with 45 percent worried that this surveillance would violate privacy rights and with 43 percent worried it wouldn’t go far enough to pursue potential terrorists. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APPoll: Congress Rating Plunges

By Melanie Batley. A whopping 83 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, giving the nation’s legislative body its worst grade ever in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

According to the survey of 1,000 adults taken July 17 to July 21, voter frustration with partisan gridlock in Washington is driving the levels of dissatisfaction with Congress. Voters also blame President Barack Obama whose job-approval rating fell to 45 percent, its lowest level since late 2011 in the Journal/NBC poll.

Perhaps most worrying for the president was the slump in support among his strongest backers, including blacks and core Democrats, while independents dropped sharply too.

Pollster Bill McInturff, who helped conduct the survey, called the dip “a telling scratch” in the president’s armor that could hurt the Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections if it gets worse.

“If ever there is an edge that falls off in the president’s core support, that is always very meaningful in an off-year election,” McInturff said. Read more from this story HERE.

Obstruction? NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails

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Photo Credit: George Frey/GettyThe NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.

But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.

I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.

Read more from this story HERE.

And You Thought the NSA was Bad: Obamacare Data Hub a ‘Honey Pot’ for Leftist ID Thieves, Warn Critics (+videos)

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Photo Credit: National Review Obamacare’s Branch of the NSA

By John Fund. President Obama has had a poor record of job creation, but at least one small economic sector is doing well: community organizing.

The Department of Health and Human Services is about to hire an army of “patient navigators” to inform Americans about the subsidized insurance promised by Obamacare and assist them in enrolling. These organizers will be guided by the new Federal Data Hub, which will give them access to reams of personal information compiled by federal agencies ranging from the IRS to the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration. “The federal government is planning to quietly enact what could be the largest consolidation of personal data in the history of the republic,” Paul Howard of the Manhattan Institute and Stephen T. Parente, a University of Minnesota finance professor, wrote in USA Today. No wonder that there are concerns about everything from identity theft to the ability of navigators to use the system to register Obamacare participants to vote.

HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius wasn’t satisfied with the $54 million in public funds allocated for navigators this year, so she tried to raise money from health-industry executives for Enroll America, the liberal nonprofit group leading the PR push for Obamacare. She had to retreat under withering criticism that she was shaking down companies that were dependent on government, a clear conflict of interest.

Because 34 states have declined to set up their own insurance “exchanges,” the job of guiding exchange enrollees in those states has been left to Washington. The identity of the groups who will get the Sebelius grants isn’t yet known, but Politico reports they are likely to include Planned Parenthood, senior-citizen advocacy organizations, and churches. Read more from this story HERE.

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Obamacare data hub a ‘honey pot’ for ID thieves, warn critics

By Paul Bedard. The data hub President Obama’s health care team is creating to exchange personal health and financial information on Obamacare users will be a ripe target for computer hackers and identity thieves, charge critics who claim it hasn’t been tested for security flaws.

“It’s the greatest collection of private identification information ever assembled on Americans that will be put into one place,” said Rep. Patrick Meehan, who chairs a House cybersecurity subcommittee. “It is every bit of sensitive information one would need to know to completely take over the identification of a person,” said the Pennsylvania lawmaker.

The Obamacare data hub, he added, “creates a honey pot and the day that it goes online it is going to be a target for hackers and others and they are unprepared to protect the system.”

At an oversight hearing last week, administration officials said that the hub, still under creation, will be used to verify Obamacare applications. It will share information among federal agencies, like the IRS, and state agencies. A separate system will keep store key information such as income, Social Security numbers, email addresses, and even pregnancy status of Obamacare users.

Officials called on the public and Congress to “trust” that the information will be protected from hackers, but several lawmakers balked. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesMidlands Voices: Stop Obamacare in its tracks

By Ben Sasse. The author has served as chief of staff for the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and as assistant U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. Currently president of Midland University, he has been exploring a U.S. Senate candidacy.

Obamacare is a ticking time bomb for Democrats in the 2014 elections. Nobody knows this better than President Barack Obama, which is why over the Fourth of July holiday weekend he unilaterally decided to delay its controversial employer mandate provision until after the midterm elections.

No wonder: The $2,000 per-worker fine is disastrously unpopular. Already, employers are laying off workers and dramatically cutting others’ hours in an effort to skirt the new penalty. The fact that this perfectly predictable development surprises many in Washington only underscores that they didn’t really read this 2,300-page monstrosity before they passed it.

Desperate for any appearance of victory, Republican leaders have decided to match the president’s delay with one of their own: proposing legislation to delay for a year the mandate for individuals. Perhaps useful, perhaps not. Well-meaning people can differ about legislative strategy.

But if Republicans don’t have a larger plan to actually oppose this unprecedented power grab in a way the American people will understand, then they will have given up the ghost on actually turning back the slew of new job-killing bureaucracies. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesGOP Senator says coalition to block and defund Obamacare is growing, names names

By Becket Adams. U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told TheBlaze Monday he has recruited more than a dozen Senate Republicans to help him defund President Barack Obama’s landmark health care law.

Fifteen Republican senators, including Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Ted Cruz (Texas), John Cornyn (Texas), Rand Paul (Ky.), James Inhofe (Okla.), David Vitter (La.), Roger Wicker (Miss.), John Thune (S.D.), and Chuck Grassley (Iowa), will block a continuing resolution to keep the government funded beyond Sept. 30 if it includes funding for Obamacare, Lee said.

“The president has said that he’s not willing and not able to enforce Obamacare as it was written,” Sen. Lee told TheBlaze in a phone interview. “And so he has chosen instead to enforce this law selectively.”

“He has picked out two things that he has said he won’t enforce. One is the employer mandate and the other is the requirement that the government obtain some kind of proof for those who are claiming eligibility for Obamacare exchange subsidies,” he added.

The senator continued, arguing that the president “doesn’t have the power” to selectively enforce and amend laws passed by Congress. Read more from this story HERE.

GOP Allows NSA, Syria Debate

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Photo Credit: APA long-delayed Pentagon appropriations bill is heading to the floor after the House Rules Committee voted Monday night to allow a structured debate including amendments related to NSA surveillance at home and the flow of military aid overseas in the Mideast.

Altogether, 100 amendments are promised consideration, but those affecting the NSA — funded in the bill — and military aid to anti-government forces in Syria are clearly the most sensitive politically for the Republican leadership.

Indeed, conservatives led by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) had threatened to defeat the rule if votes were not permitted on a bipartisan proposal to narrow the ability of the NSA to collect private call records and metadata on telephone customers in the U.S.

“It’s not a partisan issue. It’s something that cuts across the entire political spectrum,” Amash told the Rules panel. And he argued that the amendment seeks only to rein in the NSA’s “blanket authority” under the PATRIOT Act to collect records and the metadata.

Read more from this story HERE.

Secret Court OKs Continued US Phone Surveillance Program for Another Three Months (+video)

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By Fox News. The secret intelligence court that signs off on giving the U.S. government the authority to monitor hundreds of millions of telephone records has renewed the government’s request to do so for another three months.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced Friday its authority to maintain the program expired on July 19 and that the government had sought and received a renewal from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

National Intelligence Director James Clapper announced the new order.

The surveillance program has been under intense scrutiny since June, when former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of two top secret U.S. surveillance programs that critics say violate privacy rights. Read more from this story HERE.

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Secret Court Renews NSA’s Phone Records Collection

By Todd Beamon. The FISA Court in Washington oversees U.S. surveillance programs. It consists of 11 federal judges, all whom have been appointed by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

The White House disclosed the FISA’s stamp of renewed approval of the court order in an effort at greater transparency after former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of the National Security Agency’s secret U.S. surveillance programs to the media.

But bipartisan criticism continues to mount on Capitol Hill over the NSA’s collection and stockpiling of millions of Americans’ phone records without individual warrants or suspicions of connections to terrorism.

“By renewing the FISA court order, the Obama administration would reconfirm its support for the dragnet collection of telephone metadata, despite public outcry,” Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, told The Guardian newspaper of London.

Meanwhile, Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, said the White House should have let the Verizon order expire. Read more from this story HERE.

Court Says Tracking by Cell Phone Signal Off Limits

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Photo Credit: WNDAmid revelations that the National Security Agency and others have monitored Americans’ cell phone calls, a state court has affirmed the privacy rights of cell phone users.

The decision this week by the New Jersey Supreme Court in the case of Thomas W. Earls applies only to residents of the state, but it is being watched as a possible bellwether in the surging dispute over the government’s surveillance powers.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center said the decision is the first to “establish a constitutional right in location data since the U.S. Supreme Court decided United States v. Jones, a GPS tracking case in which several justices expressed concern about the collection of location data.”

In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled police could not attach a tracking device to a suspect’s vehicle and follow him without probable cause and a warrant.

In the Earls case, the court upheld that “individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location data.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Jimmy Carter: ‘America No Longer Has a Functioning Democracy’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerBy Katie McHugh. Former president Jimmy Carter condemned the effect U.S. intelligence programs had on U.S. moral authority in the wake of NSA revelations brought to light by leaker Edward Snowden, Der Spiegel reports.

“America has no functioning democracy,” Carter said at a meeting of The Atlantic Bridge in Atlanta, Georgia on Tuesday.

Carter also claimed there was currently no reason for him to be “optimistic” about Egypt’s internal conflicts and mused whether the standards The Carter Center applies to foreign elections could be fulfilled by U.S. elections, which he believes are plagued by confusing campaign rules and a lack of restrictions on free speech in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.

The former president continued that democratic developments — fueled by sites such as Facebook and Twitter — might be damaged by the NSA revelations, essentially strangling emerging democratic revolutions in the cradle by casting doubt on the social media juggernauts’ independent credibility. Read more from this story HERE.

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Jimmy Carter: George Zimmerman jury ‘right’

By Hadas Gold. The jury made the “right decision” in the George Zimmerman murder trial, former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday.

“I think the jury made the right decision based on the evidence presented, because the prosecution inadvertently set the standard so high that the jury had to be convinced that it was a deliberate act by Zimmerman that he was not at all defending himself, and so forth,” Carter told Atlanta news channel WXIA. “It’s not a moral question, it’s a legal question and the American law requires that the jury listens to the evidence presented.”

Carter said he agrees with President Barack Obama and accepts the jury’s decision. “So President Obama said he thought – it was — he regretted the decision, but he had to accept the results of the jury decision,” Carter said. Read more from this story HERE.

NSA’s Surveillance Goes “Exponentially Beyond what it had Previously Disclosed”

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Photo Credit: APNSA warned to rein in surveillance as agency reveals even greater scope

By Spencer Ackerman. The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.

John C Inglis, the deputy director of the surveillance agency, told a member of the House judiciary committee that NSA analysts can perform “a second or third hop query” through its collections of telephone data and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations.

“Hops” refers to a technical term indicating connections between people. A three-hop query means that the NSA can look at data not only from a suspected terrorist, but from everyone that suspect communicated with, and then from everyone those people communicated with, and then from everyone all of those people communicated with.

Inglis did not elaborate, nor did the members of the House panel – many of whom expressed concern and even anger at the NSA – explore the legal and privacy implications of the breadth of “three-hop” analysis.

But Inglis and other intelligence and law enforcement officials testifying before the committee said that the NSA’s ability to query the data follows rules set by the secret Fisa court, although about two dozen NSA officials determine for themselves when those criteria are satisified. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APObama loses support for renewal of surveillance; NSA phone program will expire next year

By Stephen Dinan. The lawmaker who wrote the USA Patriot Act said Wednesday that, as it stands, the House will never renew the provisions that the Obama administration uses to collect Americans’ phone records, meaning the government’s surveillance program will be cut off some time next year.

Both Democrats and Republicans told top administration officials that they reject President Obama’s claim that the law allows the intelligence community to collect the phone numbers, time, date and duration of calls made by Americans, and they said Mr. Obama needs to change the way he is running the program if he wants to keep it intact.

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who was chief author of the Patriot Act in 2001, said Congress specifically tried to limit the law’s uses when it renewed the provisions under Section 215 of the act that allow the government to collect data from businesses without obtaining a warrant.

In that renewal Congress added in the word “relevant” to try to limit what the government was pursuing. But Mr. Sensenbrenner said the intelligence community has expanded, not limited, its data-gathering efforts after Congress tried to reel them in.

“Section 215 expires at the end of 2015 and unless you realize you’ve got a problem, that is not going to be renewed. There are not the votes in the House to renew Section 215,” he said. “It’s got to be changed and you have to change how you operate Section 215. Otherwise, in a year or a year and a half, you’re not going to have it anymore.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Washington ExaminerVladimir Putin: Snowden saga won’t harm US-Russia relationship

By Brian Hughes. Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted on Wednesday that an already frosty relationship between his government and the United States would not be damaged if Russia granted asylum to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

“Bilateral relations, in my opinion, are much more important than the squabbles around the activities of the security services,” Putin told reporters in eastern Siberia.

“We warned Mr. Snowden that any of his activities that cause damage to U.S.-Russian relations are unacceptable to us.”

Snowden, the former government contractor who disclosed details about U.S. phone and Internet surveillance programs, applied for temporary asylum in Russia on Tuesday. A lawyer representing Snowden told Russia’s Interfax news agency on Wednesday that the ex-CIA official could leave Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in the next few days.

The Obama administration has repeatedly warned the Putin regime not to give Snowden refuge since he faces a trio of espionage charges back on U.S. soil. If his application were approved, Snowden could stay in Russia for up to a year. Read more from this story HERE.

Broad Coalition of Gun, Drug, Privacy Groups Sue NSA, FBI Over Surveillance while Snowden Files for Asylum

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Photo Credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPAPrivacy groups led by EFF sue to stop NSA and FBI electronic surveillance

By Associated Press. Rights activists, church leaders and drug and gun rights advocates found common ground and filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the federal government to halt a vast National Security Agency electronic surveillance program.

The lawsuit was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the unusually broad coalition of plaintiffs, and seeks an injunction against the NSA, Justice Department, FBI and directors of the agencies.

Filed in federal court in San Francisco, it challenges what the plaintiffs describe as an “illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet electronic surveillance.”

The suit came after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked details about NSA surveillance programs last month, revealing a broad US intelligence program to monitor Internet and telephone activity to ferret out terror plots.

Snowden, who has been charged with spying and theft of government property, has spent the past three weeks in the Moscow airport transit zone. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AFPSnowden to stay in Moscow airport for now: lawyer

By Maria Antonova. US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden will stay in the transit zone of the Moscow airport where he has been holed up for three weeks while Russian authorities process his asylum request, a lawyer helping him said Tuesday.

Anatoly Kucherena, a Russian lawyer who helped Snowden file an application for asylum in Russia earlier Tuesday, told AFP the fugitive former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor was happy with his treatment at the airport.

“While all procedural questions are being decided, he will remain in the transit zone of the airport,” Kucherena told AFP in central Moscow when asked if Snowden would remain at Sheremetyevo airport until the asylum request was approved.

He confirmed that the asylum procedure could take up to three months, although a shorter period is theoretically possible.

Kucherena said he met Snowden at the airport on Tuesday to file the asylum request, with a translator the only other person present. Read more from this story HERE.

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Sen. Graham suggests US boycott Winter Olympics in Russia over Snowden

By Jeremy Herb, Julian Pecquet and Justin Sink. President Obama should consider boycotting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia if the Cold War-era foe gives asylum to Edward Snowden, Sen. Lindsey Graham told The Hill on Tuesday.

“I would. I would just send the Russians the most unequivocal signal I could send them,” Graham (R-S.C.) said when asked about the possibility of a boycott.

“It might help, because what they’re doing is outrageous,” he said. “We certainly haven’t reset our relationship with Russia in a positive way. At the end of the day, if they grant this guy asylum it’s a breach of the rule of law as we know it and is a slap in the face to the United States.”

nowden, who has been charged with espionage for leaking details about two National Security Agency programs that collected information about U.S. telephone calls and international Internet usage, officially filed a request for temporary asylum in Russia on Tuesday. He pledged to abide by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands that he stop leaking information that could damage the United States.


Graham is the first senator to suggest a link between the Olympics and Snowden, who has been holed up in a Moscow airport for weeks. Read more from this story HERE.