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NSA releases Edward Snowden email

An email that leaker Edward Snowden sent to lawyers at the National Security Agency weeks before he fled his job last year raised a relatively abstract legal question and did not allege any wrongdoing at the spy agency, according to a copy of the message released by the government on Thursday.

In the April 5, 2013, message to NSA's Office of General Counsel, Snowden expressed concern that an online training course he took suggested that congressionally passed laws and presidential executive orders were of equal weight.

"My understanding is [executive orders] may be superseded by federal statute, but EOs may not override statute. Am I incorrect in this?" Snowden asked. "Between EOs and laws, which have precedence?" He also asked a similar question about Defense Department and Office of Director of National Intelligence regulations.

An NSA General Counsel's office staffer wrote back that executive orders "have the force and effect of law," adding, "That said, you are correct that E.O.s cannot override a statute."

In an interview aired Wednesday on NBC, Snowden appeared to reference the April 5 email, saying: "I reported that there were — real problems with the way the NSA was interpreting its legal authorities. And the response more or less — in bureaucratic language was, 'You should stop asking questions.'"

The response to his April 5 email encouraged him to reach out with any follow-up questions, but Snowden suggested in the NBC interview that it was just one in a series of efforts he made to raise concerns about aspects of NSA surveillance programs.

However, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the April 5 email hardly amounted to a grave warning about misconduct or legal violations. "The email ... poses a question about the relative authority of laws and executive orders — it does not register concerns about NSA’s intelligence activities, as was suggested by Snowden in an NBC interview this week," her office said in a statement, which said she backed release of the email.

Legal advisers to Snowden said the debate about what he did and didn't report internally is a distraction because it was essentially impossible for him to blow the whistle through government channels on programs all three branches of government had blessed.

"This whole dispute is irrelevant. It’s a red herring," the American Civil Liberties Union's Ben Wizner said. "What does it mean to say he should have gone [through] channels? He should have called Congress and said, 'I'm calling to report programs that you’ve approved in secret'? The problem was that the public had not been consulted as the NSA constructed and deployed a system of mass surveillance and there was no channel through which to raise those concerns, except to bring the public into that conversation."

Wizner also said the government's credibility about Snowden's complaints is in question, since the NSA told The Washington Post in December that there were no records of Snowden internally raising concerns about surveillance programs.

In a brief Q and A with the Post on Thursday, Snowden said the email release was "incomplete," and that the sudden "discovery of written contact between me and its lawyers ... raises serious concerns." Among these, Snowden says, it reveals as false the NSA's claim to the Post's Barton Gellman last December that the agency hadn't found any evidence to support the emails' existence.

He added that the release also omitted his correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorate’s Office of Compliance, which believed an executive order could take precedence over an act of Congress. Snowden reiterated that he raised his concerns on "multiple, continuing" occasions, both verbally and in writing.

"Ultimately, whether my disclosures were justified does not depend on whether I raised these concerns previously," Snowden told the Post. "That’s because the system is designed to ensure that even the most valid concerns are suppressed and ignored, not acted upon."

Nick Gass contributed to this report.