Edward Snowden appears via live stream in 2015. If he were to be convicted of all the crimes he is accused of, Snowden could face decades in prison. PHOTOGRAPH BY OLE SPATA / PICTURE-ALLIANCE / DPA / AP

This month marks the third anniversary of Edward Snowden taking up residence in Russia. In this country, he is still a wanted man. “The fact is that Mr. Snowden committed very serious crimes,” the White House spokesman Josh Earnest said last June. “The U.S. government and the Department of Justice believe that he should face them.” That remains the official position, but now, finally, some cracks appear to be emerging.

For much of the period that Snowden has been exiled in Russia, the Justice Department was run by Eric Holder, a close associate and friend of President Obama. Since leaving office, last April, Holder hasn’t said much about the case against Snowden, which was filed in June, 2013, and accused him of stealing government property, communicating national-defense information without authorization, and revealing classified information. If Snowden were to be convicted of all the crimes he is accused of, he could face decades in prison.

Over the weekend, Holder broke his silence. Appearing on “The Axe Files,” a podcast hosted by David Axelrod, Obama’s former senior adviser, Holder acknowledged what has long been obvious: Snowden, in leaking to journalists details about how the National Security Agency was spying on American citizens, “performed a public service.” But after stating this truth and further conceding that Snowden’s revelation had led to some necessary changes in laws governing the N.S.A.’s activities, Holder said that Snowden should go to jail, because he broke the law and harmed American interests.

When I saw a CNN report about Holder’s comments, I initially thought that he had perhaps been misquoted, or at least that some of his statements had been taken out of context. Not so. If you listen to the podcast, it seems like a clear case of cognitive dissonance—a dissonance that has infected the Obama Administration’s response to Snowden since the beginning.

Axelrod, it turns out, is a good interviewer: polite but probing. After taking Holder through many elements of his life, from his upbringing in New York to his record as Attorney General, he brought up Snowden and the N.S.A., noting that Snowden had recently been interviewed, via Skype, at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, where Axelrod is now serving as director.

Holder began by recounting something that Obama said in December, 2013—that just because the government (and the N.S.A.) has the ability to do things, such as engage in domestic surveillance, doesn’t mean that it should do them. “We had the capacity to do a whole range of things under these listening programs,” Holder said. “But after a while, I remember sending memos to the President asking, ‘Do we really need to do this?’—given the way in which we are focusing on people’s lives, and given the return we were getting, which was not, I think, in any way substantial.”

This passage is notable for at least two reasons. First, it explicitly endorses the claim, made by Snowden and others, that many of the N.S.A.’s domestic-spying programs didn’t yield much in the way of valuable intelligence. And, second, the passage shows that Holder not only endorsed this argument; he made it to the White House. Indeed, it was at this point in the interview that he paid tribute to Snowden, saying, “We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in, and by the changes that we made.”

The logical conclusion of this line of reasoning seems clear. Far from seeking to frog-march Snowden into court and pressing charges, including two that fall under the 1917 Espionage Act, a grateful nation should invite him back from Russia and present him with, if not a medal, then an official thank-you. But Holder, as America’s former top law-enforcement officer, couldn’t bring himself to go that far—or anywhere near there. Instead, he fell back on a set of arguments that President Obama has also offered: that Snowden broke the law (perhaps true, but surely justified on the grounds that Holder had just laid out), that he could have gone to Congress with his concerns (scarcely believable), and that he should lawyer up and come home to face the music (easy for Holder to say). This is how the exchange ended:

AXELROD: So you think he will still serve time? HOLDER: I think he should. I think he harmed American interests. I mean, I know. I can’t go into it. AXELROD: He would say he didn’t. HOLDER: No, that’s not true. That’s simply not true. I know that there are ways in which certain of our agents were put at risk, relations with other countries were harmed, our ability to keep the American people safe was compromised. There were all kinds of re-dos that had to be put in place as a result of what he did. And while those things were being done, we were blind in certain areas, in certain really critical areas. So what he did was not without consequence.

As far as I know, neither Snowden nor any of his supporters has ever claimed that what he did was without consequence. The issue comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. When will someone within the Obama Administration publicly acknowledge that whatever troubles Snowden caused the intelligence agencies were outweighed by the public service he provided in illuminating the extraordinary reach (and lack of oversight) of the surveillance state, that his whistle-blowing was justified, and that the charges against him should be dropped? Only Holder’s former boss can answer those questions.