'He should man up come back to the United States,' Kerry says. Kerry: Snowden a 'coward ... traitor'

Edward Snowden is a “coward,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday in response to the NSA leaker’s first television interview.

“Edward Snowden is a coward,” Kerry told Chuck Todd on MSNBC. “He is a traitor. And he has betrayed his country. And if he wants to come home tomorrow to face the music, he can do so.”


In a series of interviews on the Wednesday morning shows, Kerry addressed the interview between Snowden and NBC News anchor Brian Williams.

The nation’s top diplomat conceded to Todd that the debate about privacy and the NSA would not have “risen” to its current level without the Snowden disclosures. But he insisted the issues were important to President Barack Obama before the leaks and said the disclosures imperiled national security.

( Also on POLITICO: Snowden: 'I was trained as a spy')

“More importantly, much more importantly, what he’s done is hurt his country,” he said. “What he’s done is expose, for terrorists, a lot of mechanisms which now affect operational security of those terrorists and make it harder for the United States to break up plots, harder to protect our nation.”

In his appearances, Kerry was harshly critical of Snowden, saying that he had fled to an authoritarian country in Russia after harming the U.S. He also challenged the NSA leaker to return to the U.S. to “make his case” to the American public.

“He should man up, come back to the United States,” the secretary said on “CBS This Morning.” “If he has a complaint about what’s wrong with American surveillance, come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case. But instead, he’s just sitting there taking pot shots at his country, violating his oath that he took when he took on the job he took, and betraying, I think, the fundamental agreement that he entered into when he became an employee.”

On the “Today” show, Kerry also addressed Snowden’s claim, released in an excerpt from his interview with Williams, in which he said he was forced to stay in Russia because the State Department revoked his passport.

“Well, for a supposedly smart guy, that’s a pretty dumb answer, frankly,” he said.

“If Mr. Snowden wants to come back to the United States today, we’ll have him on a flight today,” Kerry added. “We’d be delighted for him to come back. And that’s what a patriot would do.”

The nation’s top diplomat has been critical of Snowden in the past, telling CNN last year: “People may die as a consequence of what this man did.”