President-elect Donald Trump has called Edward Snowden a "terrible traitor" and implied he may deserve execution, but a former leader of both the CIA and the National Security Agency says he doubts Trump will force the whistleblower's return from Russia.

Michael Hayden tells U.S. News that despite the tough talk from the billionaire businessman who campaigned as a good negotiator hopeful of improving relations with Russia, the new president likely would view getting Snowden back as a very bad deal.

“Right now, Snowden is Putin’s headache. Why would Trump want to make him his headache?” Hayden says. “I mean, simple questions of justice aside, of course.”

Without a plea deal, Snowden’s return would be controversial. Though a traitor to some, many others consider him a hero for exposing massive phone and internet surveillance programs.

Hayden is a fan of neither man. He helped implement NSA practices later exposed by Snowden, leading the electronic spy agency from 1999 to 2005 before serving as CIA director from 2006 to 2009. In an op-ed days before the presidential election, he wrote Trump shared “a sympathetic authoritarian chord” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Watch: Trump in 2015: 'If I were president, Putin would give him over':

During a Tuesday interview streamed on Twitter, Snowden presented himself as unconcerned about being returned to the U.S. to be “show-trialed,” referring to his possible inability to tell jurors in his defense why he stole classified documents and gave them to journalists.

“A lot of people are asking me this: Is there going to be some kind of deal where Trump says, ‘Hey look, give this guy to me as some kind of present’?” he said. “Is this going to happen? I don’t know. Could it happen? Sure. Am I worried about it? No, because here’s the thing: I am very comfortable with the decisions I made. I know I did the right thing.”

Snowden said if he were to be returned forcibly to the U.S. it would be “a terrible violation of human rights,” but would come with a silver lining. “It would prove once and for all that all of those allegations that this guy is a Russian spy aren’t true,” he said.

The former NSA contractor has lived in Russia since June 2013, and received political asylum after the U.S. government canceled his passport during a layover between Hong Kong and Latin America. Since then, the publications to whom he gave classified information won the Pulitzer Prize for public service, and Congress passed surveillance reforms ending the automatic bulk collection of domestic call records, which some courts had found unlawful.

Snowden's disclosures continue to shape political and legal debates. An appeals court last week heard arguments about the NSA's interception of records from cables that make up the internet's backbone, currently justified by a section of law that expires next year unless Congress renews it.

Though he faces a potentially long prison sentence in the U.S., Snowden recently has been critical of his host government’s postures toward homosexuality and internet surveillance.

It appears unlikely President Barack Obama will end Snowden's exile before leaving office. The president seemed to shut the door on a pardon last month, saying in an explanation criticized as misleading that he "can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves."