John Oliver sits opposite Edward Snowden. screenshot Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden spoke with HBO's John Oliver in Moscow recently, and one exchange stood out amid the discussion of Hot Pockets and nude photos.

"How many of those documents have you actually read?" Oliver asked, referring to the estimated 200,000 NSA documents Snowden stole and turned over to journalists in Hong Kong.

"I have evaluated all of the documents in the archive," Snowden replied.

"You've read every single one?"

"Well, I do understand what I turned over."

"There's a difference between understanding what's in the documents and reading what's in the documents," Oliver countered.

"I recognize the concern," Snowden said.

Oliver was right to press Snowden, especially considering what Snowden told The Guardian in June 2013.

“I care­fully eval­u­ated every sin­gle doc­u­ment I dis­closed to ensure that each was legit­i­mately in the pub­lic inter­est,” Snowden said. “There are all sorts of doc­u­ments that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harm­ing peo­ple isn’t my goal. Trans­parency is.”

Glenn Greenwald, the primary journalist reporting on Snowden documents, said the same thing.

"He went through and turned over only a small portion of those documents to us, all of which he read very carefully," Greenwald told Democracy Now. "And I know that not only because he told me that, but also because the way we got the documents was in extremely detailed folders ... that you could have only organized them had you carefully read them."

Based on the HBO interview, that claim is not true.



What about the other documents?

Snowden speaking with John Oliver in Moscow screenshot And then there are the documents Snowden took but didn't give to journalists.

While working at two consecutive jobs in Hawaii from March 2012 to May 2013, the 31-year-old allegedly stole about 200,000 "tier 1 and 2" documents that mostly detailed the NSA's global surveillance apparatus and were given to American journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in June 2013.

The US government believes Snowden also took up to 1.5 million "tier 3" documents potentially detailing US capabilities and NSA offensive cyber operations. The whereabouts of that second cache of documents remains unknown.

Snowden doesn't talk about the second cache of documents anymore.

In October 2013, James Risen of The New York Times reported the former CIA technician said over encrypted chat that "he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong." (ACLU lawyer and Snowden legal adviser Ben Wizner later told Business Insider the report was inaccurate.)

In May 2014, Snowden then told NBC's Brian Williams in Moscow that he "destroyed" all documents in his possession while in Hong Kong.

Snowden speaking with NBC in Moscow screenshot/NBC

The only reporting on the second cache of documents came when Snowden provided information revealing "operational details of specific attacks on computers, including internet protocol (IP) addresses, dates of attacks and whether a computer was still being monitored remotely" to Lana Lam of South China Morning Post.

"I did not release them earlier because I don't want to simply dump huge amounts of documents without regard to their content," Snowden told the Hong Kong paper in a June 12 interview. "I have to screen everything before releasing it to journalists."

He added: "If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment."

Eleven days later, on June 23, Snowden flew from Hong Kong to Moscow.

Here's the video. The exchange starts at 19:43: