How about this:

Snowden was a dirty CIA criminal cabal member.

His mission was to infiltrate NSA, steal their spy software, and make noise in the public so the public would demand the NSA's spy system be shut down (unfortunately, too many in the public had already become sheep and did not even understand what was going on, much less make demands to shut it down).

With the NSA system compromised, that would leave only CIA black ops and FVEY left to conduct spy ops, with NSA not able to adequately watch what the black ops were doing.

Snowden and his co-conspirators would then deliver spy software to China, which was planned as the new HQ for the cabal's black ops.

Russia was a diversion, since cabal was already planning on Uranium One to frame Russia when nukes went off from Iran or North Korea.

Snowden never went to Russia. He stayed in Hong Kong/China the whole time.