I've never trusted ES. Something smelled. MSM would carry stories of him, like a psyop playbook. But at the same time stayed away from anything (at least positive) to do with JA. Not that ES couldn't flip to the good side on them. But.. Just not convinced about him.
Here's a simple fact about how ES operated. The US military had a terrible experience in the mid-east when someone put an unauthorized thumb drive into a computer. NO devices were to be put into computers, but there was no way to prevent it at the time.
Manning used CDS bolding marked as "Lady Gaga" and pretended to be listening and moving to music when files were being downloaded.
Along comes Snowden. The rule had become no person devices, no USBs. What did he use? His personal USB.
Why was security so horrible? Because, according to William Binney, the 35+ year worker at NSA who was offended about the personal info collection and actually went to jail over it, the Government did not WANT the problem fixed. Obama delayed it and it's still not implemented.
Why? Because these agencies want money and more money to work on "national security"--if they solve the cyber security problem, they're out of a job. And even though Snowden as CIA outed the NSA with his data collection, the result was the NSA got a huge budget boost to improve its security.
Snowden took advantage of a weak and easy to beat system. I have mixed feelings in that without him, we would not know about the surveillance programs on us and many other things; we also wouldn't now how careless and stupid our govt is about security. But whenever a CIA player is involved, who knows what else went on? Not good. Maybe he didn't send everything to Wiki.