The Kremlin thinks everyone should see Oliver Stone’s adulatory bio-pic Snowden. “[It has] a brilliant script,” said Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, “and, what is most important, it is nearly a documentary. This is an excellent opportunity for everyone to learn what actually happened. It’s a must-see.”

American critics and moviegoers disagree. Snowden has gotten terrible reviews and has not drawn viewers. Its total box-office take so far ($15.1 million) puts it at Number 83 among 100 movies released so far this year.

Let us hope that the campaign to pardon Snowden, timed to the movie’s release, sinks out of sight just as rapidly. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the ACLU, among other groups, have been holding press conferences and writing op-eds claiming that Snowden is a principled “whistle-blower” who prompted an “important” debate about civil liberties with his revelations about the extent of NSA spying.

The Intelligence Community has been hamstrung in replying because the full extent of the damage that Snowden did to national security by stealing 1.5 million documents remains classified. But it is significant that after studying the issue, the House Intelligence Committee recommended unanimously against a pardon. The bulk of the committee’s report remains classified, but a three-page executive summary gives a flavor of its contents. Among the committee’s findings:

—”Snowden … handed over secrets that protect American troops overseas and secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation-states. Some of Snowden’s disclosures exacerbated and accelerated existing trends that diminished the [Intelligence Community’s] capabilities to collect against legitimate foreign intelligence targets, while others resulted in the loss of intelligence streams that had saved American lives.”

—”Even by a conservative estimate, the U.S. Government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and will eventually spend billions, to attempt to mitigate the damage Snowden caused. These dollars would have been better spent on combating Americ’s adversaries in an increasingly dangerous world.”

—”Snowden was not a whistleblower… Contrary to his public claims that he notified numerous NSA officials about What he believed to be illegal intelligence collection, the Committee found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about U.S. intelligence activities-legal, moral, or otherwise to any oversight officials within the U.S. Government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so.”

More information on the damage that Snowden did is readily available in open-source reporting, which makes clear that much of what Snowden revealed had nothing to do with protecting the privacy of American citizens. As Jack Goldsmith, former assistant attorney general, noted: “To take just a few of hundreds of examples, why did his oath to the Constitution justify disclosure that NSA had developed MonsterMind, a program to respond to cyber attacks automatically; or that it had set up data centers in China to insert malware into Chinese computers and had penetrated Huawei in China; or that it was spying (with details about how) in many other foreign nations, on Bin Laden associate Hassam Ghul’s wife, on the UN Secretary General, or on the Islamic State; or that it cooperates with intelligence services in Sweden and Norway to spy on Russia; and so on, and so on.”

The bottom line is that the Snowden revelations are indefensible even if you think Snowden performed a public service by outing the existence of the metadata program to collect information on who is calling whom in the United States (but without delving into the content of the phone calls). Nothing Snowden revealed was illegal or unauthorized. He was not blowing the whistle on abuses that have occurred in the past, such as spying on civil rights or antiwar activists in the 1960s-1970s. He is not even comparable to Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked secret information about past activities of the U.S. government, not about ongoing programs. And, unlike Ellsberg, who was arrested and faced trial, Snowden fled the country and now resides as a guest of Vladimir Putin, an anti-American dictator.

If President Obama were to pardon Snowden on his way out of office, as so many on the left want, he will be doing great harm to his legacy and, even more important, to the ability of the U.S. intelligence community to keep us safe. If Snowden can get away with what he did, no secrets can possibly be safe and any disaffected employees of the U.S. government will have carte blanche to leak whatever information crosses their computer terminals.

Snowden certainly deserves his day in court. If he returns to this country he will get the fair trial to which any criminal defendant, even a traitor, is entitled. Who knows? Maybe a jury will buy his outlandish claims of being a good-hearted whistleblower. But he is not entitled to a pardon that will clear the way for him to return home as a conquering hero.